Envy between women

Abstract

It has traditionally been assumed within our culture that women have a strong streak of covert envy, spite and malice that emerges in a particularly virulent form with other members of their own sex. In the early decades of the 20th century fierce controversy raged about Freud’s theory that penis envy was crucial to female psychology. Some of Freud’s colleagues accused him of male bias because he failed to see the deep envy that men felt for women. For instance Karen Horney, a German psychoanalyst, put forward the thesis that men subjugated women and excluded them from social and political power because of their envy of women’s procreative capacities (1926). Contemporary feminists continue to discuss whether Freud was denigrating women or simply describing their unenviable position in societies where they are still second-class. ‘No phallus, no power, except those winning ways of gaining one’, wrote Juliet Mitchell, in support of Freud (1974: 96). I have written extensively elsewhere about envy between the sexes — so-called ‘penis’ and ’womb’ envy — both of which I believe to be absolutely crucial to the perpetuation of sexual inequality (Maguire, 1995).

1 This chapter is a substantially revised version of my paper ‘Casting the evil eye: envy between women’, originally published in S. Ernst & M. Maguire, Living with the Sphinx: Papers from the Women’s Therapy Centre, The Women’s Press, London, 1987.