The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause

This amazing book was offered to me by an older woman friend (and confirmed feminist) when I began to wonder aloud about perimenopausal reactions such as hot flashes and unexpected heavy menstrual bleeding. Having been buried in infant childcare and graduate schoolwork during Greer's writing heyday, I had heard her name and been "interested but too busy". Her writings are today a gift for the spirit to me. Greer's no-holds-barred descriptions and truth-telling are a welcome and often hilarious relief from the myriad of opinions, fears, whispered innuendos and symptom-treating attitudes of friends and the medical establishment around this natural change. The description of living a life biased by estrogen-induced mood swings and attitudes for 35 years, followed by a return of the stable, freedom-loving self really hit home for me. This overarching theme of return to the self makes hilarious the attitudes toward older women called "immature" or "irresponsible" when they follow a path determined by their heart instead of that laid out for them by patriarchal rules. The only possible reaction from a woman truly returning to herself is to laugh in the face of people who would like her to now become invisible, be silent and tend only to her grandchildren or her aging spouse. The world NEEDS the clear-headed involvement of the only adult humans not affected by sexual hormones and the subsequent mood swings -- women after menopause. Menopause is liberation -- bring it on!

So many books with menopause deal with it on the most condescending and superficial level, telling women nothing is really happening to them, except physical discomfort such as hot flashes, etc. In other words, shut up and stop the fuss. Greer validated for me what a cataclysm this is; the most traumatic episode in a woman's life until her death. Facing this hard, hard truth is paradoxically liberating. Only when a woman is stripped of the two overriding reasons society values her (physical beauty and childbearing) is she free to become her real self, or as Greer puts it, can she evolve from a body to a soul. If you remember the girl you were before menstruation started, that girl will sustain you. Any woman close to or over 50 who feels her life is the same as over (as I did) has to read this book. It will save your life. I will always love Germaine Greer for having written this book.

Greer's international take on the medicalization of menopause distinguishes her book from others. What is considered state of the art in Britain, France, Australia, and the United States is somewhat different from country to country. Drugs and treatments available in one country are unavailable in others. The pet drug in each country is one produced by a drug company headquartered in that country. The United States, of course, comes out as champion in the medicalization of menopause. Greer did not hesitate to put forth her pet theories in the midst of statistics and reports of double-blind studies. She is very much present in her writing, and the book greatly benefits. Greer believes the second half of life is about becoming spiritual, and the second half of her book is her testimonial of her midlife passage, liberally sprinkled with testimonials from diaries and novels dating back to the 1700s. The reader experiences her passage, from the first chapters with her femini! sm in full view as she lambasts the medicalization of menopause to the final chapters when she describes her joy on being on the other side of fifty: "Before, I felt less on greater provocation; I lay in the arms of young men who loved me and felt less bliss than I do now. What I felt then was hope, fear, jealousy, desire, passion, a mixture of real pain, and real and fake pleasure, a mash of conflicting feelings, anything but this deep still joy. I needed my lovers too much to experience much joy in our travailed relationships. I was too much at their mercy to feel much in the way of tenderness; I can feel as much in a tiny compass now when I see a butterfly still damp and crinkled from the chrysalis taking a first flutter among the brambles." For those among us who approach our climacteric "alone," Greer makes clear that the relationship with the self can be the most joyous and satisfying of all relationships.