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
