What do ‘catcalls’ have to do with cats?

“A law against catcalls?” asked my husband skeptically. “What next, criminalizing booing and hissing?”

He often gets the wrong end of the stick, but in this case I hardly blame him, for the British press retailed widely Conservative Party leadership contender Liz Truss’s resolve to make a law against catcalls and wolf-whistles. But to an older generation like my husband’s, catcalling is something to do with the theater.

In Practical Cats, T.S. Eliot assures us that Gus the Theatre Cat acted with Irving and Tree — Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905), who Shaw said revealed on stage “glimpses of a latent bestial dangerousness,” and Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852-1917), noted for histrionic versatility. But then Eliot mentions Gus’s “success on the Halls, / Where the Gallery once gave him seven cat-calls.” The play on words, which puzzled me as a child, is on curtain-calls.

Catcall was originally the name for the squeaking or whistling instrument on which the noise was made. In March 1660, Samuel Pepys bought one in Pope’s Head Alley, a place in the City selling cutlery and toys. It cost him two groats. We do not, I think, learn whether he employed it in the theater. But in April 1712, in No. 361 of The Spectator (no relation), Joseph Addison tells of a country squire going to see The Humorous Lieutenant, by Beaumont and Fletcher. At curtain-up he “was very much surprized with the great Consort of Cat-calls which was exhibited that Evening.” He thought it odd to see “so many Persons of Quality of both Sexes assembled together at a kind of Catterwawling.”

It was not until the 1980s that the catcall escaped from the theater to the street, made without mechanical help and directed at women. “Hey babe, you want to get lucky?” the male Marines called to women recruits outside a barracks, wrote Randy Shilts, a gay journalist in San Francisco, who died of AIDS in 1994.

I suspect the phrase was by then influenced by the American cat house, “brothel,” used from the 1930s. Cat meaning “prostitute,” current in Britain from 1400 to 1700, had become obsolete, the Oxford English Dictionary says. Under Liz Truss as prime minister, the UK shall be driven back into the theater, or perhaps parliament, to make cat calls.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 2022 World edition.