An alley cat is, in the first place, exactly what it sounds like: a stray or half-wild cat that lives in the back alleys of a town, scavenging for food and answering to nobody. Applied to a person, it is an insult with two related edges. The older and sharper one means someone promiscuous, originally and most often a woman; the broader one means anyone disreputable, shameless or scrappy. Both figurative uses survive mainly in set comparisons: to have ‘the morals of an alley cat’ or to ‘fight like an alley cat’.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘alley cat’?
The literal sense came first, and it is American. As US cities grew through the late nineteenth century their alleys filled with scavenging, ownerless cats, and ‘alley cat’ was the obvious name for them. The compound is recorded from the 1880s: the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest evidence is reported from 1886, in an Ohio newspaper, the Marion Daily Star, and Etymonline has it attested by 1890. There is no story to the coinage itself. It is simply a cat, in an alley.
The figurative uses grew out of the animal’s reputation. An alley cat prowls at night, yowls, fights and breeds with no discrimination whatever, and by the early twentieth century Americans were transferring the name to people thought to behave the same way. Dictionary.com records the term from 1900-05 and glosses the extended sense as ‘a promiscuous woman; also, a person of loose morals’.
The type got its literary monument in 1916, when the columnist Don Marquis introduced Mehitabel in his ‘Sun Dial’ column in the New York Evening Sun. Mehitabel is an alley cat who insists she is a reincarnation of Cleopatra and greets every fresh disaster with a shrug of ‘wotthehell, wotthehell’. The pieces were collected as archy and mehitabel in 1927 and remain in print. She fixed the alley cat’s public character for good: raffish, unrepentant and impossible to keep down. The same decade was coining feline compliments as well as insults, among them the cat’s pajamas.
From the promiscuity sense came the stock put-down ‘the morals of an alley cat’, which is still doing service after a century of urban cats living mostly indoors. Its most conspicuous recent outing was in the presidential debate of June 2024, when Joe Biden told Donald Trump ‘You have the morals of an alley cat’. The line trended within minutes, though much of its appeal was the period flavour of the phrase, which to younger ears sounded like a lyric from Guys and Dolls. ‘Fight like an alley cat’, the other surviving comparison, is milder and even faintly admiring: it describes anyone who fights without technique but with total commitment.