Catfight - Female Responses To Catfights

Female Responses To Catfights

Women have often been critical of the term "catfight", particularly when it's used in ways that may seem to inappropriately sexualize, neutralize or trivialize disagreements among women on serious topics.

Feminist historians say use of the term catfight to label female opponents goes back to 1940, when American newspapers characterized as a catfight a dispute between Clare Boothe Luce and journalist Dorothy Thompson over which candidate to support in the 1940 Presidential campaign. One newspaper called it "a confrontation between two blonde Valkryies", and journalist Walter Winchell, upon running into Luce and Thompson at a nightclub, reportedly urged them to refrain from fighting, saying "Ladies, ladies, remember there are gentlemen present." Luce later said she learned from this that although it was acceptable for men to disagree violently, women's disagreements would immediately be called a catfight, fingernail-scratching or hair-pulling contest.

In the 1970s, in what feminist historians have characterized as a divide-and-conquer strategy aiming to neutralize and trivialize feminist issues, the American news media began to use the term catfight to describe women's disagreements about issues related to women's rights, such as the Equal Rights Amendment. Historian Susan J. Douglas says this served two important ideological purposes: it promoted division rather than unity among women from different ethnic, class, generational and regional lines, and it replaced the notion of "sisterhood" with competitive individualism.

Filmmaker and writer Kathleen Sweeney describes catfight scenarios as patriarchal attempts to undermine female bonds, and argues they teach girls to be rivals for male attention in ways that males find "titillating, arousing and/or comical/ridiculous", and that reinforce female gender codes of manipulation and backstabbing.