A Major Turning Point 
Menopause is one of the major turning points in a woman's life. 

Some women dread reaching menopause while others look forward to it. Some feel it is an affliction that will make them unattractive, lonely, helpless, and useless. They mourn the loss of their fertility and youth. 

Other women discover that it gives them a new lease on life -- physically, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually. They are enthusiastic about becoming free of their concerns about pregnancy and premenstrual syndrome (PMS). 

Most experience a wide range of feelings, from anxiety and discomfort to release and relief. If you are like most of today's women, you will live a third of your life after menopause. Planned Parenthood urges you to plan ahead for what could prove to be one of the most rewarding and enriching times of your life.

Menopause signals continuous change. How a woman feels during the course of not only one day but over a period of weeks,  months or years may vary tremendously. Depending on individual circumstances feelings towards menopause underwent  conspicuous changes: night sweats were a source of bother and irritability one day and absent on other days thereby causing  feelings to swing back and forth like a pendulum on a clock. When interviews were conducted the recorded notes were  accurate only for that brief moment in time. Upon return visits at a later date earlier strongly-held beliefs tended to shift.  Discrepancies were most noticeable when a month or more had gone by between the first visit and follow-ups. Especially  group discussions represented a valuable source in accelerating the process of coming to terms not only with the physical reality  of aging but also how women felt about it.

MENOPAUSE IN HMONG WOMEN", Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology, Special Issue on THE MENOPAUSE, 13, 79-92, 1995.

The meaning and experience of menopause among Hmong women from Laos is examined in this paper. Hmong women see the menopause as part of growing old. A woman becomes menopausal only when she has borne all of her children. Although having many children is highly valued women do not see menopause as a negative stage since they have already borne many children and thus have ensured the continuity of lineage. Women also associate menopause with the polluted nature of menstruation. Once menstruation has ceased a woman becomes clean like a man and she is able to relax more. It appears that Hmong women perceive menopause as positive and that they experience few so-called menopausal symptoms. However, because of the availability of western health care and the relative unavailability of traditional herbal medicines and healers in Australia, women seek help from mainstream health services when they experience ill health of any kind. This inevitably puts women in mid life into contact with current medical interpretations of menopause. Will Hmong women be encouraged to interpret menopause as a medically oriented event and thus experience menopausal symptoms in the way many Australian women do? It remains to be seen. 

Extracted from http://www.pslgroup.com/dg/9020e.htm
WASHINGTON, DC -- July 23, 1998 -- Japanese women experience far fewer difficulties with menopause than their North American counterparts, new research shows. Most notably, reports of symptoms such as hot flashes and night sweats are significantly lower (not nonexistent - Tishy) among a study group of Japanese women than among comparative samples of American and Canadian women. 

In the July-August issue of Psychosomatic Medicine, medical anthropologist Margaret Lock, PhD, of McGill University, Montreal, QC., presents findings based on a decade of research on menopause and aging in Japan. Dr. Lock said that biological and cultural variables act in concert to produce these marked differences in the way Japanese women and their North American counterparts experience menopause. 

"Together with other cross-cultural research, these data indicate that postmenopausal life is a complex biosocial process, one in which declining estrogen levels are but one factor among numerous others," she writes. “Menopause should not be conceptualised as simply an invariant biological transformation with individual differences due solely to psychological and cultural variation." 

FEMINISM, THE MENOPAUSE AND HORMONAL REPLACEMENT THERAPY.By Jane Lewis

It followed that when a woman did not bleed for a year and did not bear a child, people believed she retained her wise blood. At that time she became a respected elder, judge, teacher, healer and leader. Her community respected her as a powerful and loving wise person who honored and cherished life. In her later years part of her purpose was to help humanity move through the passage of death as she had once helped us move through the passage of birth.. 

Wise women,
respected elders who were
judges, healers, teachers,
guides through death passages
disappeared from our culture. 

I wonder how many
of the nine million
murdered witches
were women in menopause.