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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 6KB | 130 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 80

BOOKS

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.