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"Dedicated to young people so that they may enter charted seas, and avoid the hidden rocks that wrecked their elders' joy." We are still hoping for the same thing... CHANGE OF LIFE IN MEN AND WOMEN by Marie Carmichael Stopes, Putnam 1936 |
| How long? | Women naturally want to know how long this "change" is going to last. Many contradictory statements are made about this too. Perhaps, the general feeling is, "oh, I hope it is soon over!" This attitude is mistaken, however, and the most natural and healthy way for it to proceed is slowly little by little, and to spread over at least a couple of years. |
| Gradual is best | The most favourable and most natural mode of cessation of the menstrual flow, is for its quantity gradually to lessen month by month and then, when the amount has reduced itself to a very small quantity, for its appearance to cease altogether |
| Twice yearly | Some women in whom this happens continue to have small but real menstrual flows twice a year or once a year at the seasons when fertility is more active, and they may continue this for several years at half-yearly intervals, thus returning to what was probably the primitive normal. |
| Imperceptible | In such gentle ways nature passes imperceptibly from one phase to the next without upheaval or disturbance of the general health. Women (excepting those injured by specific disease), can do much to control their own physiological processes so as to secure such an optimum, if they have enough knowledge of the laws of health, and enough strength of mind to apply such knowledge to themselves. Even under present conditions a larger number of women experience such natural gradual cessation than suffer from aberrations. |
| Great variation | We do not know about
the past, and our facts of the process are taken from records of the last
half century. The time taken to grow through the changes of the climacteric
seems to vary very greatly, and ranges from a few months to ten years or
more.
Dr. Kisch even mentions a case experiencing this phase for eighteen years, but this is possibly unique. Perhaps the average may be between one and three years. Dr. Kisch quotes Dr. Tilt's figures as follows: Duration of "change."
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| Underestimation
of
time span |
But Dr. Bauer in his book Woman (English translation, 1926) is, as I have said, sarcastic, about the general custom of speaking of the "years" of the change, saying: "Why `years is not clear. This process cannot take years; it is at most a matter of about ten months." This is patently absurd, for we know that a woman may become pregnant as many as three years after the last appearance of the menstrual flow, providing that the change had lasted at least that length of time. |
| Slower is more natural | A child does not spring in a few days into an adolescent girl; it takes long for the breasts slowly to form and the onsetting flow to be established. The woman who slowly returns to a non-fertile life is more natural than she who has a rapid change. |
| Climacteric
more extensive
than menopause |
The careless way even medical writers use the words "menopause and "climacteric" as though they were interchangeable, leads to much confusion and apparent contradiction.Dr. Maranón, who is careful and discriminating, and considers the climacteric to be a much more extensive phenomenon than the menopause, says that it may take many years to be accomplished. |
| Gradual rearrangements | In a healthy man or woman, whose system passes gradually through the processes of the re-arrangements of the climacteric, there is a slow reduction in the secretions of some of the genital glands which is compensated for by secretions from other internal glands in such a manner that no external disturbance is apparent and the consciousness is no more assailed by their functioning than it is by all the chain of glandular secretions and compensations involved in the digestion of a meal. |
| Climacteric consciousness | That the women of our cockney civilisation suffer so much from climacteric consciousness is hardly to be wondered at, for we are even digestion-conscious. If any one doubts the latter let him read the advertisement columns of the more popular newspapers and magazines. Yet we all, at least, admit that the manifold compensating glandular outpourings of digestion should and can be entirely self-regulating, and carried on out of the realm of conscious disturbance; so in my opinion it is a mixture of tragedy and absurdity that there still should be novelty in the idea that the climacteric in men and women should be equally self-regulating and happily removed from conscious disturbance |