Nowadays, we think we know all there is to know about sex, having babies, contraception, and all that. Yet we seem to know so little about the menopause. Why don’t we talk about it more, compare notes, learn from each other? We do about most other things.
Talking about the menopause is something that most women have just never done. We talk about other aspects of our lives, but not this one. As a result, a conspiracy of shame and silence has drifted down the generations, expressed in such phrases as: ‘It’s her time of life’, ‘She’s going through the Change, poor old thing’, ‘Take no notice of her, she’s just having a hot flush’. Say no more, nudge nudge, wink wink.
Now, however, at last, compared with their predecessors, women reaching the menopause could be the lucky ones, the ones who know about it and are well informed. They can recognise hot flushes and other symptoms for what they are: the body’s response to a fall in the level of the female hormone oestrogen – simply that. They are not something shameful; nor do they mean we are suddenly old. After all, who wants to feel old at 50? It will be another 30 years before you need even to start worrying about that, so don t wish it on yourself now.
Part of the problem is that, until fairly recently, the majority of women didn’t live long enough to experience the menopause. Until reliable birth control became readily available, women who bore children tended to spend the majority of their married lives in a state of pregnancy or breast-feeding until their early forties. A combination of continuing pregnancies and the hazards of childbirth, as well as poor sanitation and inadequate health care, meant that, even at the start of the twentieth century, most women were dead by about fifty. So it is hardly surprising that so little was known about the menopause, let alone talked about.
Those who did survive to the menopause never made much of a fuss about it. They used a bit of self-medication, herbal remedies handed down through the generations, or exciting dietary supplements like ‘two sheep’s ovaries a day sandwiched between unleavened bread’, or ‘one tankard dairy of the urine of a she-goat’, and waited for it to pass.
Today, we often feel the menopause is just another illness to be treated by visits to the doctor and by medication. We hear the term ‘deficiency disease’, that is we are deficient in oestrogen. Yet most women still don’t really know what the menopause is, when it might happen, what to expect, and what can be done to ease their passage through it.
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