44 OCTOBER 2019 THE ATLANTIC

BOOKS

The Secret Power of

Menopause

The end of fertility doesn’t mark the start of decline.

BY LIZA MUNDY

Little wonder that women writers have felt the

need to weigh in over the centuries. A few took an

upbeat approach. At the age of 41, having just given

birth to her sixth child, the suffragist Elizabeth

Cady Stanton wrote her friend Susan B. Antho-

ny in 1857 to say that their best activist years lay

ahead. “We shall not be in our prime before fifty

& after that we shall be good for twenty years at

least.” Others were less sanguine. At 54, writing

her memoir, Simone de Beauvoir gloomily pre-

pared to say “goodbye to all those things I once

enjoyed”; women, Freud had taught her, become

miserable and sexless as they age. Betty Friedan,

Gloria Steinem, Helen Gurley Brown, Germaine

Greer—all warily chronicled their maturity, as of

course did the writer who invented the concept of

“passage,” Gail Sheehy. Nora Ephron felt bad about

her neck, and her anxiety spawned a best seller.

Even now it’s hard for a woman not to dread the

consequences of moving out of youth. One of the

wryest recent meditations is an episode of Inside

Amy Schumer, in which the eponymous comedian

happens upon three of her comedic icons—Tina

Fey, Patricia Arquette, and Juli a Louis- Dreyfus—

picnicking in a meadow. They are celebrating Louis-

Dreyfus’s “last fuckable day,” as adjudicated by the

media, Fey explains. Schumer, feigning astonish-

ment, asks whether the media do this to men. The

trio laughs and laughs.

T

HREE NEW BOOKS about post-

menopausal womanhood show that the

conversation is changing. For the first

time, The New York Times noted early this year, a

sizable cohort of women is moving into the sixth

and seventh decades of life with a surfeit of ener-

gy and workplace experience. Women are better

edu cated than men. Many spend early middle age

constrained by work-life challenges, like athletes

training with ankle weights. Once the weights come

off, they have the muscle to run. Literally: The 2020

slate of female presidential candidates is Exhib it A.

The landscape looks different due to the #MeToo

movement as well. In some ways, it has divided

women by generation, yet even older women who

may regret a return to the idea of feminine fragility

are overjoyed to see workplace predators toppled.

The unseating of men like Charlie Rose and Matt

Lauer has opened the way for women like Chris-

tiane Amanpour and Gayle King to occupy top

spots, where they exemplify what 60-something

really looks like: pretty freaking great.

The current conversation is also informed by

evolutionary biology, which evaluates traits based

on their reproductive purpose. Given that meno-

pause is nonreproductive by definition, biologists

consider it a “big evolutionary puzzle,” the novelist

Darcey Steinke writes in her memoir, Flash Count

Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life.

D

ON’T TRY TO TELL THIS to a mother sitting in the
bleachers during a four-hour swim meet; or enduring a
birthday party involving toddlers and craft projects; or
resting in an armchair on a peaceful evening, savoring
the heft of a tiny body and the scent of an infant’s freshly
washed hair. Interminable or sweetly languid though
they may feel in the moment, the childbearing years are
startlingly brief. Fertility, which typically ends in a woman’s mid-40s, occupies
less than half of her adult life. And then, if she’s lucky, she has 30 or 40 years in
which to do something else.
Most people don’t realize how unusual humans are, in the way that non-
reproductive females (how shall I put this?) persist. Females of most other spe-
cies can bear young until they die, and many do, or at best enjoy a brief respite
from breeding before death. This is true not only of creatures you might expect,
such as rabbits, but also of long-lived mammals such as Asian elephants, and of
primates such as gorillas and chimps. The odd exceptions—the Japanese aphid,
for example, enters a “glue bomb” stage after her reproductive phase, ready to
im mobilize a colony intruder—only prove the rule.
The mystery of why women go on and on and on after their procreative
function has ceased has occupied some of the great minds of the ages. I am
sorry to report that many of those minds have not been forward-thinking.
“It is a well-known fact ... that after women have lost their genital function
their character often undergoes a peculiar alteration” and they become
“quarrelsome, vexatious and overbearing,” Sigmund Freud pronounced. The
male-dominated medical community of the mid-20th century was similarly
dismissive. “The unpalatable truth must be faced that all postmenopausal
women are castrates,” opined the gynecologist Robert Wilson, who elabo-
rated on this theme in his 1966 best seller, Feminine Forever. The influential
book, it later emerged, was backed by a pharmaceutical company eager to
market hormone- replacement therapy.
Even the architects of the sexual revolution were fixated on fertility as
a marker of femininity, an attitude that seems doubly unfair coming from
the people who gave us the pill. “Once the ovaries stop, the very essence of
being a woman stops,” wrote the psychiatrist David Reuben in 1969 in Every-
thing You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, adding that
the post menopausal woman comes “as close as she can to being a man.” Or
rather, “not really a man but no longer a functional woman.”