MENOPAUSE: EVOLUTION AND THE VICTORIAN HANGOVER
Another reason for the mystery surrounding menopause is that human females today are monkeying with evolution. Most higher primates do not live long enough in the wild even to have a menopause; the phenomenon has never been clearly established in apes or monkeys, according to Kim Wallen, a researcher at Emory University's Yerkes Primate Center. Most female animals just go right on breeding until they roll over and die.
The same was true of human females for many thousands of years. At the turn of the century a woman could expect to live to the age of forty-seven or -eight. She bore an average of eight children, which kept her busy giving birth or nursing right up to menopause.
Nature, then, never provided for women who would routinely live several decades beyond the age of fifty. Once females had made their genetic contribution, evolution was finished with them, and society followed suit. In view of this historically powerful linkage of menopause with decline and death, is it any wonder that today's women approach fifty under a shadow of archetypal fears of being transformed, all at once, into Old Woman?
The secrecy, shame, and ignorance that still veil this natural transition have carried over from the Victorian age with very little mitigation of the punishing stereotypes. "Menopause in the nineteenth century was described only in terms of what women lose at this stage of life," says Marilyn Yalom, senior scholar at the Stanford University Institute for Research on Women and Gender. The Victorians were obsessed with women as reproductive creatures. Once barren and widowed, as they were likely to be by fifty, they were cued to view menopause as "the gateway to old age through which a woman passed at the peril of her life." Yalom's chapter in the documentary text Victorian Women quotes nineteenth-century obstetricians who taught that "the change of life unhinges the female nervous system and deprives women of their personal charm." These attitudes were tempered somewhat by the sassy and energetic social activists who emerged between 1890 and 1920, a period that celebrated "the renaissance of the middle-aged." As death in childbirth was reduced, middle-class women began to appreciate the possibilities of a full life cycle and to cluster their childbearing in the earlier years of marriage. In their mature years they took up social causes, marched in parades, and founded movements. The great feminist leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton celebrated the liberation of being in their fifties and continued as activists well into their sixties. Cosmopolitan magazine sang the praises of vital women of menopausal age in 1903: "The woman of fifty who only a few years ago would have been sent to the ranks of dowagers and grandmothers, today is celebrated for distinctive charm and beauty, ripe views, disciplined intellect, cultivated and manifold gifts." Once the twenties got underway, however, the former stereotypes resurfaced.
The most famed women writers over the past hundred years have largely ignored, or been ignorant of, menopause. The romantic novels of George Sand, one of the most staggeringly prolific writers of the nineteenth century in the French language, were read as widely as Balzac's and Hugo's throughout the European continent. Sand also penned twenty-five volumes of letters while inspiring the music of her younger lover, Frederic Chopin. Yet in this vast landscape of words scholar Marilyn Yalom has uncovered only two personal letters in which Sand refers to the symptoms of menopause. In the first, written to her editor, Hetzel, in 1853, Sand was forty-nine years old:
I am as well as I can be, given the crisis of my age. So far everything has taken place without grave consequence, but with sweats that I find overwhelming, and which are laughable because they are imaginary. I experience the phenomenon of believing that I am sweating 15 or 20 times a day and night... I have both the heat and the fatigue. I wipe my face with a white handkerchief and it is laughable because I am not sweating at all. However, that makes me very tired.
Sand was chiding herself out of ignorance for having hot flashes and night sweats. Often a woman does not perspire, even though she is experiencing an abrupt leap in skin temperature of one or two degrees. "Even today it's very difficult to explain to a woman that it's a real neurophysiological event, not a psychological event at all, and therefore nothing she should be ashamed of," says Dr. Robert Lindsay, an endocrinologist and leading researcher in the field of menopausal medicine at the Helen Hayes Bone Center in West Haverstraw, New York. Not until the mid-1970s were laboratory tests developed that could demonstrate objectively the neurological discharge in the brain that causes the subjective changes women describe. When a woman says, "I am now having a hot flash," a machine similar to an EKG will show a spike in the ink line running across it.
George Sand refused to allow this inconvenience to interrupt her productivity and finished her letter by saying, "Nonetheless I am working and I've just done a play in three acts Weeks later she indicated in a letter to her son that she had "rounded the horn" and felt better than she had for a long time. Sand was smart enough to know that even she should make a healthy adaptation in the exhausting nocturnal work habits she had devised, as a young mother, to work around domestic duties. "I sleep well, I eat well, I no longer have those flashes and I'm working without fatigue. It is true that I don't give myself to excess anymore and at one o'clock in the morning I wrap myself in my bed without hesitation."
One in the morning, for George Sand, was early. After fifty she stopped writing from midnight to 4:00 a.m. But by then she was a polished professional with twenty years of writing behind her, and she was able to ensconce herself at her country estate and produce the many novels for which she is famous. George Sand was still vibrant, and still writing, when she died at the age of seventy-two.
Anais Nin, another fearless watchwoman over the back alleys of the female psyche, neglected the subject in her writings. Virginia Woolf's fragile nature was bedeviled by physical illness and mental anguish at every stage. She attracted particularly harsh criticism for the book that expressed her viewpoint as a woman in her fifties, Three Guineas. Woolf attributed none of her ills to menopause and never mentioned it in her writings, though she must have passed through it before she took her own life at fifty-nine. Colette was one of the rare writers to mention menopause at all in her work, portraying it in her novel Break of Day as both daunting and potentially empowering.
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Womens health