Womb envy denotes the envy men may feel towards a woman's role in nurturing and sustaining life. In coining the term, the
Neo-Freudian psychiatrist Karen Horney (1885–1952) proposed that men experience womb envy more powerfully than women experience penis envy, because "men need to disparage women more than women need to disparage men". This feeling is stronger in men because they want to live up to the male stereotype of having the upper hand and dominance over everyone. Boehm (1930, p. 457) said that when others have something more that we do not have ourselves then this excites our envy. As a
psychoanalyst, Horney considered womb envy a cultural,
psychosocial tendency, like the concept of penis envy, rather than an innate male psychological trait. Although Karen Horney is generally credited with originating the idea of "womb envy," especially in her 1926 article "The Flight from Womanhood: The Masculinity-Complex in Women as Viewed by Men and by Women," she herself never used the term. One early appearance of the phrase was in
Margaret Mead's 1949 book,
Male and Female. Mead may have coined the term. Brian Luke, in his book
Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals, Luke attributes the coining of this term not to Horney, but to
Eva Kittay. In her 1984 article, ''Rereading Freud on 'Femininity' or Why Not Womb Envy?'', Kittay had posed the question of why there is not a concept analogous to penis envy and offers the term womb envy. Discussing the limitations of Horney's broader psychological viewpoint, Bernardo J. Carducci points out the comparative lack of empirical evidence saying, "In comparison to other theorists..., Horney's work has generated very little empirical research among personality psychologists. Although her theoretical ideas were presented in a relatively straightforward manner, they have not stimulated much interest in others to investigate their validity. This may be in part due to the rejection of her ideas by the more traditional and influential Freudian tradition operating at the time." In ''
Eve's Seed'' (2000), historian
Robert S. McElvaine extended Horney's argument that womb envy is a powerful, elementary factor in the psychological
insecurity suffered by many men. He coined the term
non-menstrual syndrome (NMS), denoting a man's possible insecurity before the biologic and reproductive traits of woman; thus, womb envy may impel men to define their
identities in opposition to women. Hence, men who are envious of women's reproductive traits insist that a "real man" must be "not-a-woman", thus they may seek to socially dominate women—what they may or may not do in life—as psychological compensation for what men cannot do biologically. Along with womb envy there are other mentions that also discussed on topic of womb envy though not the exact name. Michael Joseph Eisler (1921) wrote it by looking at male pregnancy fantasies, not the direct term of womb envy is mentioned but contributed the male envy of female reproductive physiology was directed towards it.
Boehm (1930) called it parturition envy instead,
Zilboorg (1944) called it women envy, and
Phyllis Chesler (1978) called it uterus envy. ==Vagina envy==