When J.D. Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies” from a 2021 Fox News interview resurfaced on social media over the summer, Amy Cooper took umbrage and then action.
Without consulting her staff, and ignoring the reservations of good friends, Cooper, who owns The Barn Owl Books and Gifts in McCall, Idaho, assembled a display table of all things feline at the front of her store. She stocked it with fiction whose heroines are childless cat ladies — Claire Alexander’s “Meredith Alone;” books from Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” series, whose covers feature a graphic of a fluffy feline; James Norbury’s “The Cat Who Taught Zen;” Francesco Mariuliano’s book of love poems by cats (marketed as an ideal gift for cat lovers); cat magnets and stickers; a book of cat postcards and a couple of plush cat puppets.
“It was my little protest,” said Cooper, who has identified as “a childless cat — and dog — lady for most of my life.” Like Kamala Harris, the target of Vance’s slur, Cooper got married relatively late — she was 49 — to a man who has children from a previous marriage. The display, she said, expressed her outrage at the Republican candidate for Vice President: “How dare you? How dare you make such a sweeping, ignorant generalization?”
It was a potentially risky, if coded, move: Cooper lives and works in Valley County, which spans 3,733 square miles across central Idaho. With 61% of its 8,606 voters registered as Republican, it “leans Republican” on a state heatmap. The Barn Owl is a private business, and Cooper stands by her right to show and sell the books she wants, but she recognizes that not all her customers share her political views. She walks a fine line determining what events to hold in the bookstore and which books to stock.
“It’s getting trickier,” she said. “The waters are getting more politicized and views more extreme.”
Idaho’s libraries face similar pressure. In recent years, the state has become a testing ground for conservative efforts to politicize them. Idaho House Bill 710, signed into law in April, requires public and school libraries to move any materials considered “harmful to minors” to an adults-only section or risk paying damages of $250 to anyone who makes a claim against them.
Despite the risk of lost business or retribution, Idaho’s libraries and bookstores have become spaces where communities gather to advocate for voters’ rights and push back against efforts to restrict access to books, albeit quietly.
“In Idaho, the libraries and the bookstores represent the values of this state,” said Jean Henscheid, co-president of the League of Women Voters of Idaho, and a seventh-generation resident of the state.
Idahoans, she maintains, have a high capacity for civil discourse and engagement. And places where there are books are often ideal for this purpose, even in, or perhaps especially in, a fraught political environment.
This past spring, as the election season ramped up, the nonpartisan League deployed a voter registration and ballot education effort focused on libraries and bookstores. It reached out to the state’s 103 libraries, offering to provide information to the local electorate about changes to the voter registration process that were signed into law in 2023. Under the new legislation, those registering must present specific forms of photo identification and proof of residency — a burden for those without a driver’s license, which may include senior citizens, people with disabilities, people without a vehicle and homeless people, as well as students, whose student IDs are no longer an acceptable form of identification, opponents of the changes argued.
“Hello Librarian Friends and Fellow Book Lovers,” the League’s letter offering voter-education assistance began. About a quarter of the state’s libraries responded, perhaps encouraged by seeing that it was signed by Becky Proctor, the League’s state treasurer and a past president of the Idaho Library Association.
The League coordinated in-person visits and educational events at the libraries while also fielding emails, phone calls, and texts. It also hosted several voter registration events at Rediscovered Books, an independent bookstore in Boise. Henscheid traveled to libraries across the state to present workshops on the new registration requirements that particularly affect seniors and students, and she guided attendees through Proposition 1, a highly contested proposal on Tuesday’s ballot that, if passed, will bring ranked voting to Idaho’s primaries.
While local libraries, especially in rural areas of the state, often act as de facto community centers and serve the League’s educational efforts well, local residents are careful not to involve their libraries in activities that may put them on the front lines. When House Bill 710 went into effect on July 1, the Idaho Democratic Party coordinated demonstrations across the state. In Valley County, local Democratic organizers donated to the McCall Public Library instead. They made an oversized check, the sort you’d see on Publisher’s Clearinghouse commercials, and presented it to the library, nominally in support of a new addition under construction. They chose not to demonstrate there, said Bill Thomas, the chair of Valley County Democrats, to avoid drawing undue attention to the library.
“We didn’t want to feature it and put them in the bullseye,” he said.
Cooper decided a few years ago to keep a banned book display up at The Barn Owl year-round, not just during Banned Books Week. She has seen educators gather around it to talk about the books, and she has seen people leave the store after they encountered it.
“We’ve probably lost a customer long-term,” she said.
Disgruntled patrons have hidden books they object to or turned the spines to face the back of the shelf so they can’t be read. The books most often on the receiving end of this treatment include “Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out” by Susan Kuklin, “Sex Is a Funny Word” by Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth, and “Quick and Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns” by Archie Bongiovanni and Tristan Jimerson, among others that address gender and sexuality — exactly the subjects that House Bill 710 takes aim at.
Cooper’s politics shelves are less contested, but she admits they now lean more left. When she first opened her store, in 2018, she offered an even mix of conservative and liberal authors. Today, though she will put out a good Bill O’Reilly nonfiction biography — “He’s written about Jesus, Lincoln, a lot of good folks” —she is reluctant to stock titles that she deems hyperbolic or that espouse mis- or disinformation.
Cooper received favorable comments on her cat display but took it down after a week. She is, after all, a book seller, and keeping the displays fresh is part of the job.
In a heated political climate in a state that ranges from salmon pink “leans Republican” to deep red “very Republican,” both activists and regular citizens feel genuine anxiety about voicing dissent. Interactions at recent political events have been contentious, confirming that their uneasiness isn’t misplaced.
Henscheid hasn’t experienced a lack of civility at the libraries where she has helped register voters or at Rediscovered Books events. But, she said, “We are talking about a representative sample of Idaho, people who go to libraries and bookstores.”
So, while Cooper’s cat table protest may fall under the category of “if you know, you know,” she’s speaking to an audience that may have been heartened to get the message.
(Photo credit: Ana González Vilá)
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