No level of employment is really free of this endless pressure. The executive must meet and exceed his last year’s quota or the quota of his competitors. Those under him must see that he does it, and he scrutinizes their performances most severely and therefore constantly.
Professional men—doctors, lawyers, professors—are under no less pressure for the most part. If the lawyer is self-employed he must constantly seek new clients; if he works for an organization he must exert himself endlessly to avoid being superseded by ambitious peers or by pushing young particles just out of law school and filled with the raw energy of youth. A score of unhappy contingencies can ruin or seriously threaten a doctor’s practice, not the least of which is a possible breakdown in his ability to practice. A teacher must work long hours on publishable projects outside of his arduous teaching assignments if he is to advance or even hold his ground.
There is no field of endeavor that a man may enter where he can count on complete economic safety; competition, the need for unremitting year-in, year-out performance, is his life lot. Over all this he knows, too, stands a separate specter upon which he can exert only the remotest control. It is the joblessness which may be caused by the cyclical depressions and recessions that characterize our economy.
It is true; all men have nightmares.
Few if any women could take the kind of daily strain and worry men commit themselves to when they sign the marriage contract. And no woman in her right mind would want to take it. It is true that many women go into the market place, but most of them are waiting only for the day that they marry, or they are already married. Those who stay of their own free will are few and far between, and in my experience some have proven to be difficult people in their family relationships, though some of them are talented. Women are designed for duties different from those of the market place, another kind of stress entirely, and lose or tend to lose their essential womanliness if they stay by choice.
As women look at man’s characteristic of aggressiveness in terms of the tremendous duties, daily struggles, and awful responsibilities men must and do assume, they can begin to call up in themselves a different emotion from anger or envy. They can begin to see how altogether worthy of their highest admiration man is. Not just some abstract man, either; the man they love, the man they have married, the man upon whom they have been heaping their criticism, their jealousy and rage.
Far from seeking to enslave our sex, to exploit us through his strength and his aggression, man has put these two great and basic attributes entirely at our service. It is (and always has been) this fact that makes it safe for us to be women, to bear his children with a sense of security, to rear them, knowing that he is there, always and forever, earning our bread, watching over us ceaselessly, keeping his terrible anxieties about us and our safety to himself so that we will not worry as he does.
Certain it is that boys are generally given their freedom a lot earlier than girls. And it is also true that the quality of aggression in the male makes him the wooer and the woman the wooed. I have yet to hear a woman suffering from a frigidity problem who did not deeply resent both of these facts.
But now, looking at the end to which male aggression is directed when it matures, can any woman honestly hold onto such resentment? When she realizes that society instinctively grants him more and earlier freedom so that he may develop the great self-reliance necessary to take on the responsibilities of a family, she cannot validly hold this view any longer.
Nor can she hold onto her resentment of the fact that it is generally the male who initiates the sexual act. For it is the same male aggression which protects her, allows her to be wife and mother, that makes him the wooer and she the wooed. Again, knowing how easily women are distracted from sexual feeling by trivial upsets, by the small things that occur during the day, imagine what would happen if women had to take the male’s anxieties and yet be responsible for initiating sex at night. Should such a reversal of roles ever happen to mankind, the world would soon be depopulated. Women must learn to thank God daily for the enormous energy and drive of their men.