| In recent weeks, Americans have battled over “childless cat ladies,” the misogynistic phrase invoked, in 2021, by J. D. Vance, now the Republican nominee for Vice-President. The controversy is the latest episode in the endless partisan struggle over women, reproduction, and morality—a ritual that doesn’t look likely to abate anytime soon. In the spring of 1950, The New Yorker’s Janet Flanner chronicled the reproductive scandal that was then inflaming U.S. politicians. Ingrid Bergman, the Oscar-winning star of “Gaslight,” “Casablanca,” and “Notorious,” had caused outrage not by opting out of motherhood but by the circumstances in which she entered into it. Bergman hadn’t quite finalized her divorce from her first husband when she delivered a baby—in Rome, conceived with the director Roberto Rossellini—a condition that got her denounced in the Senate as “a powerful influence for evil.” Writing from Italy, Flanner reported on photographers’ extreme efforts to snap an image of the newborn, including asking “a nun, one of the hospital staff who went down to try to quiet the racket, if she would swear on the Bible that Miss Bergman was not in the hospital.” In the previous year, the actress had received tens of thousands of letters about her “so-called private life,” Flanner noted, ninety-nine per cent of them from Americans. The experience couldn’t have been fun for Bergman, but her critic in the Senate didn’t get the last word. In 1972—twenty-two years too late to be included in Flanner’s article—another senator, a Republican, praised Bergman as “talented” and “gracious,” and apologized for the whole affair in the Congressional Record. | 
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