The Atlantic - October 2019

46 OCTOBER 2019 THE ATLANTIC

As the white-collar workplace expanded in the

industrial era, women were shouldered out of it,

eroding female social power across the age range.

Older black women were a mainstay of early civil-

rights struggles, but the contributions of acti vists

such as Mary Church Terrell and Mary McLeod

Bethune were sidelined, the credit given to younger

men. And women’s return to the workforce during

World War II gave way to postwar pressure to depart

it, which delivered mixed results for older women.

In the 1960s and ’70s, important strides were made

thanks to female workers such as flight attendants,

who filed class-action lawsuits protesting rules that

obliged them to retire if they married or reached

age 35. Yet as women’s earning potential grew along

with their work span and sexual freedom, the more

senior among them faced newly corrosive pressures.

It may not be a coincidence that Wilson, Reuben,

and their ilk pushed the perils of “the menopause”

during this era. The centrality of sexual liberty to

the women’s movement arguably left second-wave

feminists more vulnerable to insecurity about their

bodies and looks. Susan Mattern proposes that the

very concept of a menopausal syndrome was the

invention of a culture that aimed to psychologi-

cally weaken women in a strong period of life—at

a historical moment when female power was rising.

“Dominant groups,” she observes, “can be very cre-

ative in inventing new ways of oppressing people.”

Yet I’m struck, reading these accounts, that Stan-

ton intuited what remains true today: Women have

a different life trajectory than men, and the place of

menopause in it is liberating in a way that’s worth

considering. To describe a passage of life, even a

painful one, can itself be a form of empowerment.

Men, too, feel loss and insecurity as they age, and

perhaps could use a map of sorts themselves. Cross-

ing the midlife point, many struggle to recalibrate

professional ambition (as Arthur Brooks’s article

in The Atlantic’s July issue revealed) and to build

stronger social and intimate ties. Online-dating

sites betray men’s own anxiety about physical

decline (“My friends say I look much younger than

60!”) and suggest that many men are perfectly will-

ing to date women across the age range. The sex

books are right: Men aren’t as picky about women’s

bodies as women fear. Men crave sex, but they also

crave conversation, a partner with confidence and

achievements. Even Simone de Beauvoir changed

her mind. In The Coming of Age, a book about the

expe rience of getting older, she wrote that she had

crossed a “frontier” and found peace. She had also

taken a younger lover. “It has been far less sombre,”

she reported, “than I had foreseen.”

Liza Mundy is the author, most recently, of Code

Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women

Code Breakers of World War II. She is a senior

fellow at New America.

epidemic or a crisis: Those fertile women could

repro duce quickly, but no woman could do so

forever, sparing the tribe the risk of over population.

With the advent of farming, menopause still served

an impor tant purpose. The most prosperous time

for a peasant family was postmenopausal, Mat-

tern argues, when older children could help and

the family no longer had new members to sup-

port. Nowadays, with fewer children and more

resources, she brightly adds, “women past meno-

pause, who historically used their energy surplus to

help their families survive, can now use it in other

ways.” While Steinke experienced menopause as

a shutting- down, Mattern sees it as an opening-up.

B

OTH VIEWS ARE TRUE, as the Ne w
York Times columnist Gail Collins shows in
No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older
Women in American History, which spans the colo-
nial era to the present. Her takeaway is that older
women fare well when circumstances permit them
to be productive: “If you’re important economically,
you’re important.” Providing allocare is well and
good, but “eras in which older women were able to
earn money or increase their family assets were eras
in which they were ... popular,” Collins writes drily.
Tracing their shifting status, she observes that
during the colonial period, women continued spin-
ning, weaving, and the like into old age. Physically,
of course, the stage could be hell—pelvic disorders,
childbirth damage, rotting teeth. Older enslaved
women were exiled and horribly neglected. Yet
often, the only thing worse than being a woman
was being a man: Male mortality was higher, and
widow hood could be a blessing—widows, at least
white ones, could own property (unlike married
women). Then, as the country became more pop-
ulated, men monopolized the jobs. Women had
less of an economic purpose, and they lost status.
Collins highlights the great age of social reform
in the mid-19th century as another period when
older women enjoyed prestige, though less be-
cause they had economic power than because they
wielded moral authority. Notably, they used that
authority to make the case for, among other things,
female clout well into later life. A standout among
women’s-rights advocates, Elizabeth Cady Stanton
argued that women could occupy different spheres
at different life stages, moving from narrow domes-
tic concerns to community- minded platforms.
Stanton, Collins writes, “believed that menopause
had redirected all her ‘vital forces’ from her repro-
ductive organs to her brain.” Vital she and Susan
B. Anthony certainly were as they barnstormed the
country, made speeches on tabletops, played cards
with soldiers. Their age allowed them to “have
adven tures.” At the same time, one observer wrote,
“stately Mrs. Stanton has secured much immunity
by a comfortable look of motherliness.”

BOOKS

THE SLOW MOON

CLIMBS: THE

SCIENCE, HISTORY,

AND MEANING OF

MENOPAUSE

SUSAN MATTERN

Princeton University Press

FLASH COUNT DIARY:

MENOPAUSE AND

THE VINDICATION OF

NATURAL LIFE

DARCEY STEINKE

FSG

NO STOPPING US NOW:

THE ADVENTURES

OF OLDER WOMEN IN

AMERICAN HISTORY

GAIL COLLINS

Little, Brown