Famous Feminist Suffered from Penis Envy?

Sigmund Freud first introduced the theory of penis envy in his 1908 article “On the Sexual Theories of Children,” and expanded on the idea in his 1914 On Narcissism.

In Freud’s theory, women suffered from castration anxiety due to the realization that they did not have a penis.

In a Room of One’s Own,Virgina Woolf appears to reference this Victorian anxiety metaphorically in the guise of a tailless cat:

the manx cat, who did look a little absurd, poor beast, without a tail, in the middle of the lawn. Was he really born so, or had he lost his tail in an accident? The tailless cat, though some are said to exist in the Isle of Man, is rarer than one thinks. It is a queer animal, quaint rather than beautiful. It is strange what a difference a tail makes–

This mundane description of a cat is elevated to the metaphoric by its juxtaposition within a narrative about the academic exclusion of woman.  The lawn, cat, and tail serve as euphemisms for body parts.

But did Virginia Woolf really suffer from penis envy? There is one more important clue. The reference to the Isle of Man. This tiny municipality was the first country in the world to grant women the right to vote. In essence, the first to recognize the equality of women. The true manx represents the holistic view of women–naturally complete–not the subject of some tragic misfortune. For Victorians like Woolf, such women were rare indeed.

It appears that Woolf did not necessarily envy the penis, but the power and freedom the penis represented in Victorian England.