Illustration by ELENI KALORKOTI THE ATLANTIC OCTOBER 2019 45According to the prevailing view, a human female BOOKS
possesses all the eggs she will have while still in the
womb; the number promptly begins diminishing,
and by her mid-40s, the remaining ova have deteri-
orated. To an evolutionary biolo gist, this is interest-
ing and weird. To Steinke, it was miserable and hard.
Her book is lyrical but a bit depressing, because she
herself was depressed.
Some women experience few symptoms during
menopause, but Steinke suffered nearly two awful
years of hot flashes, acute episodes that were like
“four- minute surprise anxiety attacks.” She sensed
mortality stalking her: “For the first time, I feel I
have a time stamp, an expi ration date.” She writes
vividly and a little wistfully about sex, mourning
her lost desirability, as she sees it, and the wan-
ing of her own desire. She feels angry; she yells at
her husband. “Early times of sexual frenzy seem
almost impossible now.”
Every woman is of course entitled to—can’t
escape— her own response to menopause. But
Steinke’s melancholy reflections sound a bit
retro grade, as if she can’t escape those insuffer-
able doctors, the Wilsons and the Reubens, with
their pompous pronouncements about the wreck-
age that remains when estrogen, like a tide, drains
away. “Without hormones my femininity is fray-
ing,” she writes. In a transitional state herself, she
identifies with people who are transitioning out of
their birth gender—not that the empathy brings
much relief.
Steinke also identifies with one of the few other
species that enjoy a long postmenopausal life: killer
whales. In the ocean, nonreproductive females play
an important role. With the wisdom of years, they
guide their pod to the best salmon. Steinke kayaks in
waters off the coast of Seattle, hoping to commune,
and is rewarded with a magnificent breaching. “The
wild matriarchs have given me hope,” she writes.
“They are neither frail nor apprehensive, but in every
way leaders of their communities.”T
HAT MENOPAUSE MAY ENABLE a new
role and stature for women is the central
argument of The Slow Moon Climbs: The
Science, History, and Meaning of Menopause, by
Susan Mattern. A historian at the University of
Georgia, she steps away from the personal to con-
sider “humani ty’s massive primeval past.” Once
upon a time, scientists assumed that women (and
men) were designed to live to about 50, and that
menopause was an accident, a by-product of medi-
cal progress. Yet even in primitive societies, it turns
out, a portion of women lived well past middle age,
which suggests that menopause is a feature, not a
bug, of human evolution.
Mattern has her own audacious theory as to why:
Menopause is a key to our success as a species. In
humanity’s hunter-gatherer days, tribes needed a
balance of producers and consumers— people who
brought in food, and people who ate it. Most adults
did both. Not so children, who remain dependent
during the long period of brain development. Mem-
bers who could bring in food for more than one per-
son without adding to the population were crucial.
Enter the postmenopausal female. The anthro-
pologist Kristen Hawkes studied a modern forag-
ing tribe, the Hadza, and found that an energetic
group of older women brought “more food into
camp than any other age and sex category.” This
paved the way for the Grandmother Hypothesis:
Not only do older women serve as food producers,
but they are providers of “allocare,” communal
child care. In the Hadza and other tribes, Mattern
writes, women “reach peak foraging productivity
in their 50s and continue to produce a caloric sur-
plus through old age.” She points out that tribes
have been known to kill members who can’t con-
tribute. If grandmothers aren’t murdered, she rea-
sons, that is because they are useful.
Mattern makes the case that menopause prob-
ably emerged in humans when we diverged from
chimpanzees millions of years ago. It gave Homo
sapi ens an advantage over other species of hom-
inids such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, she
proposes. Limiting childbearing to younger women,
whose offspring could be cared for by older women,
enabled the species to bounce back from an