A cuckold is a man whose wife has been unfaithful to him, symbolized (for reasons I do not fully understand) by the betrayed man wearing horns atop his head.
If there’s a femal equivalent that exists, what’s the word, and what’s the symbol?
Alimony. 
Closest I can think of is a “woman scorned”. According to some sources, the term comes from the “cuckoo” bird, and the origin of the wearing horns symbolism is obscure.
I can help a bit with the questions you haven’t actually asked. (Sorry.)
“Cuckold” comes from “cuckoo” after the birds’ trick of laying their eggs in other birds’ nests. ie; if you’re raising another man’s children, you’ve been cuckolded.
It is said that in Europe, cuckolded men were literally given horns. No one is certain of what it represented – either an attempt to restore virility, or to show that he was angry.
Perhaps the word was never defined, because it was always OK for the man to be unfaithful.
According to this article:
It wasn’t “always OK”. However, many did have the attitude of “boys will be boys”. And men years ago didn’t think it proper to speculate about the sexual liasons of other men. (The change was unfortunate for the Clinton’s.) Thus so long as the man was discreet about it, and he cared for his wife and family, she wouldn’t be seen as a feminine “cuckold”.
I kept focussing on “cuckold” being somehow related to cock and the sexual act and not the logical result (raising someone else’s kid) so for the very first time I get the term, Larry. It also explains why a woman can’t be a cuckold – unlike a man, if her husband sleeps around, she isn’t very well going to be unwittingly raising another woman’s child as her own.
I’ve always assumed that the symbolism of the cuckold’s horns is that he’s still got an erection (is horny!) because his wife won’t sleep with him, since she’s been satisfied elsewhere.
It’s not that it was considered any less morally wrong for a married man to have sex with someone other than his wife than for a married woman to have sex with someone other than her husband, it’s that morality in the sense we think of it wasn’t relevant to this entire situation. A man was considered to own his wife. If someone else had sex with his wife, the other man had stolen something from the husband. On the other hand, if a married man had sex with someone other than his wife, nothing had been stolen from the wife, since she didn’t own the husband. The only person who could complain about this was a man with some relation to the woman that the husband had had sex with. If she was married, it was her husband. If she was single, it was her father or her brothers.
Of course, a man or a woman could complain that his wife or her husband was cheating on him or her, but that was merely a private sin and not relevant to cuckolding. Cuckolding was a property crime, in effect. The idea of cuckolding only makes sense in a society in which a husband is considered to own a wife. In a situation like ours where a marriage is, in effect, a business merger, it makes sense that either spouse having sex outside of marriage is considered to be “cheating.”
One reason why there is no female equivalent to cuckold is the sense of “honor offended” that cuckold implies. A man who has been cuckolded has been made a fool; a woman who has been cheated upon is simply a victim.
The man is supposed to be able to ward off any assaults on his “honor” (both by demonstrating enough “virility” that his wife would not wish to cheat on him and by being enough of a threat that no other man would dare tresspass on “his turf”). A woman may occasionally be accused of not providing enough “satisfaction” to keep “her man” at home, but men have been given more latitude to wander, so the woman is not generally considered a failure if her husband does wander.
I think the lack of a female term has a lot to do with paternity and less to do with, “it was okay to do it because women were property back in the bad old days.”
A man who has been ‘cuckolded’ [is that a verb?] would be put in the position of raising another man’s child unknowingly. This is in keeping with the root of the word, assuming it’s correct, as coming from the cuckoo.
The female equivalent just doesn’t work very well since she’s going to know for damn sure if the kid isn’t hers.
Thought exercise: what’s the male equivalent of “pregnant?”
There’s a word for everything!
Cuckquean a female cuckold , first cite 1560, obsolete.
From the Oxford English Dictionary.
Dammit, you beat me to it! Completely at random I came across a very obscene Ben Jonson poem today that included that word.
Now I’m intrigued. The first risqué poem of Jonson’s that sprang to mind was the Famous Voyage but no sign of the word there.
I can’t recall where exactly I first came across cuckquean but I’ve got a feeling it was in one of the early Elizabethan dramatists, Greene, perhaps, or Lyly.
Whatever, it’s a great word.
I thought the horns of a cuckold referred to satyrs, or some other mythological beast.
But satyrs were the ones doing the screwing, not the ones abandoned for other men.
Whatever the word turns out to be, it can be used to describe the feeling you have, as a woman, when you’ve found out that your husband has been hanging up kitchen cabinets and installed wall to wall carpeting in the house of your female rival.
Cuckquean is a gender opposite term of cuckold derived from Middle English (1562 CE).
Cuckquean refers to a woman with an adulterous husband. In modern English it generally refers to the sexual fetish in which sexual gratification is gained from maintenance or observation of sexual relations by a man with a woman or a number of women besides his girlfriend, fiancé, wife or other long-term female sex partner, and therefore, the reversed gender roles of a cuckold relationship.[