Chronicling The Change

By Barbara Ehrenreich

SUBJECT: MENOPAUSE

THE BOTTOM LINE: To Gail Sheehy, "the change" is a plunge into pathology. To Germaine Greer, it's a spiritual crisis. Both ladies protest too much.

NINETEEN MILLION FEMALE BABY boomers are marching up to that slippery patch of the life cycle once known as "the dangerous age." This is the generation of American women that reinvented feminism, wrote Our Bodies, Ourselves, and learned to examine their cervices with mirrors. But can they prevail over menopause -- the hormonal bog that ate up Ur-feminist Simone de Beauvoir and that reportedly reduces sleek Hollywood women to palpitations and tears?

Menopause is not exactly terra incognita. Edith Bunker dithered through a few hot flashes on All in the Family. Kathy Bates' mood-swinging character in Fried Green Tomatoes tore down walls and built them back up again while Jessica Tandy exhorted her to "take those hormones!" and get on with her life.

But 19 million middle-aged women facing a murky life-cycle transition are, if nothing else, a major book market. Gail Sheehy's slim and chatty menopause book, The Silent Passage (Random House; $16), has been on the best-seller list for 20 weeks. Now comes Germaine Greer's dense, angry meditation, The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause (Knopf; $24). The two books deserve credit for making menopause a word that can be uttered in mixed company, but you don't have to be perimenopausal to experience a full range of symptoms as you work through these books, from hot flashes of rage to the cold sweat of terror.

In Sheehy's The Silent Passage, menopausal women are incapacitated or at least severely derailed by insomnia, loss of libido, hot flashes and depression. At one point Sheehy pauses to ask, "Are we getting all worked up over something that is, in fact, quite normal and has been experienced since time immemorial?" Well, yes -- Japanese women, for example, don't even have a word for "hot flash" -- but never mind. Menopause is a swamp of pathology, in Sheehy's view, curable with a positive attitude and, in appropriate cases, a lifetime supply of Premarin.

No such feel-good stuff for Greer, the former celebrator of liberated sexuality who has grown up to be an avenging angel of radical feminism. Forget sex, she says, especially with those "fat, beefy, beery, smelly" middle-aged men. Forget artificial hormones too, since they are marketed by evil, male- dominated multinational corporations. The only point of agreement between Sheehy and Greer is that menopause is a soul-shattering change, a passage to a new life -- in Sheehy's more upbeat view, a stern confrontation with death; in Greer's scheme, a time to put aside worldly things (coffee and tea as well as sex) and take up witchcraft or, depending on one's tastes, religion.

All this will no doubt reassure the middle-aged woman who has been suffering $ away in silence, wondering if she isn't, perhaps, losing it. But for the woman who's feeling just fine, thank you, who isn't planning to start either a "second adulthood" or a new life as a "crone" (Greer's term), the new menopause genre will read like the ghastly tracts on menstruation that used to be inflicted on girls in the 1950s. Puberty then, like menopause now, was a portal labeled ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.

An objective person, for example, would be forced to conclude from Sheehy and Greer that it is unwise ever to hire a woman over 45 -- or 40, just to be safe. Some of Sheehy's sources can "barely function," and Greer reports that "many women" experience episodes of "gasping fury" that leave them "calling down horrible vengeance and uttering mad threats" -- not exactly the emotional tone one looks for in a supervisor or officemate. As for the woman who sails right through "the change," she's probably lying (Sheehy) or in denial (Greer).

Well, what about Lynn Yeakel or Barbara Boxer, one keeps wanting to ask, running for the Senate at the "dangerous age" of 51 -- or any number of our year-of-the-woman stars? Are they in denial too? Women already spend much of their lives in service to biology -- bearing and raising children; so how sad to arrive, finally, at the empty nest, only to find that it's bubbling over with its own toxic hormonal brew.

In fact, there's a certain nasty streak of biology-as-destiny in both of the new menopause tomes. The existential adjustments the authors advise seem wholesome enough, yet it's not clear why they should be tied to such an obvious nonevent as the cessation of menstruation (which, with the latest technology, does not even necessarily signal the end of childbearing). There's no age that isn't a good time to confront one's mortality or to consider a second adulthood -- for men as well as women.

And there's an odd failure to reckon with the cultural side of menopause. Outside of affluent, white societies, menopause apparently goes by without much notice -- either because women's sufferings are considered unimportant or because the sufferings just don't occur. Greer coins the term anophobia to describe the irrational fear and dislike of old women so prevalent in Western culture, and one can't help wondering how menopause would be experienced in an "anophiliac" setting -- where elderly women receive the same respect and honor as gray-templed males. Hot flashes might feel like surges of energy, or like the "rush((es)) of revelation" described in an earlier menopause best seller, Barbara Raskin's ebullient 1987 novel, Hot Flashes.

Maybe it isn't surprising that the first big menopause books to greet the baby boomers are so morbid and alarmist. A book titled Menopause: No Big Deal might better describe the experience of a generation of busy, high-achieving women. But it probably wouldn't leap off the shelves.