| To
WELCOME
To CONTENTS |
Reassuring extracts adapted (mainly by reformatting) from CHANGE OF LIFE IN MEN AND WOMEN by MARIE CARMICHAEL STOPES |
| I HAVE already mentioned
a few examples of the false and frightening teaching and talk so current
about “the change” in women. But in this chapter dealing specially with
women's physiology as distinct from characters shared by the two sexes,
I must mention and comment on a few more because I want to release women
from the fears generated by falsehood and to do this they must be faced
and dissected.
The Viennese gynecologist, Dr. Bauer, in his book Woman, translated by Jerdon and Haire, 1926, says: “The next great shock in the woman’s physical life occurs at the menopause or ‘change' of life. It is customary to speak of the ‘years' of the change of life, but why ‘years' is not clear. . . This process cannot take years, it is at most a matter of about ten months.” The translators feel impelled to contradict this false pundit at this point. |
| "She has ceased to be a woman" | Dr. Bauer continues: “When the menopause is over the woman has ceased to be a woman in the full sense of the word.” Then he proceeds to deal out general insults to women in a fashion all too prevalent in continental medical literature. A little further on he says: “The duration of woman' s active sex-life is limited from the beginning of menstruation until the menopause, and women know quite well that after this their sex- life is at an end.” |
| Mary Scharlieb | The little book for nurses called the The Change of Life; Its Difficulties and Dangers, by Dr.Mary Scharlieb, also perpetrates the same harmful falsehood in its very first sentence: “There are two very momentous epochs in a woman's life, puberty, which marks the commencement of sexual activity, and the menopause, which marks its close.” All through the little book an unwholesome atmosphere is created. |
| Nurses creating fear | Nurses are often the link between the pundits of the medical profession and the poor patients who are crying out for help. Nurses are trained to take instruction from the medical profession as a kind of gospel, so it is doubly pernicious that nurses should receive such unhealthy ideas, for they disseminate widely to patients who trust and confide in them any views they are taught. Gloomy anticipations of the menopause cloud the lives of many women, not only at the time of the critical period itself but in anticipation long before it arrives; healthy happiness is over-cast and fear is generated. This fear is in itself the very cause of the majority of the “difficulties” of this time. Fear has made unnecessary difficulties materialise, which should never have come into existence; nor would they were that fear not generated in the minds of those who seek knowledge by the very people who ought to know enough to counteract the fear instead of to generate it. |
| Pendulous abdomen | Dr. Scharlieb, describing the woman at the climacteric, says: “the abdomen is apt to become pendulous.” One asks, why? Is it not simply for lack of strength and support in the frontal abdominal muscles? Does Dr. Mary Scharlieb anywhere in the little volume make this clear and teach the nurses to train their patients while they are still young and strong to make this unpleasant future possibility remote by keeping the outer wall defences of their own bodies strong and resistant as they should be? No. There is merely the ugly and frightening picture of the pendulous abdomen—no explanation—no protection from the bogey. |
| Tiresome flatulence | On the fourth page “tiresome flatulence so frequent at this time of life” is spoken of with no clear statement that flatulence at any time of life means improper diet and improper management of the general health. After the ugliness of the fat climacteric women is presented, nurses are then told about women who absorb their surface fat “and then there develops the woman whose appearance is supposed to be typical of an elderly spinster. She is hard, dry and angular, thin and austere of countenance, flat-chested, and somewhat hollow in the abdominal region.” |
| Medicos
pessimistic
views |
Between these two unpleasant alternatives, there is no mention of the happy mean, the ripening of the healthy, happy woman. Contrariwise, Dr. Scharlieb then says: “There may be a doubt as to which type of physique is to be preferred.” Why can she not, and her nurses following her, hold up an ideal of health and beauty? We are, however, told a little further on that “it is fair to believe that many women do the best work of which they are capable when sexual life is ended.” There is no hint, however, of the good work and healthy happiness of the woman whose sex life and general femininity are maintained. Ninon de l Enclos dying at ninety-one with a body as exquisite as that of a young girl is of course so exceptional that quite naturally she is not mentioned; but surely even medicos who specialise in disease and see little, apparently, of general health, should conjure up from their own acquaintances a healthier and more natural picture of mature womanhood than is portrayed in this brochure. |
| Unpleasant symptoms | In addition to the gradual cessation or stoppage of the menstrual flow, the other symptoms of the feminine menopause described as usual by Dr. Kisch are, the following: “The woman is for some months in an irritable condition, complains of digestive disturbances, constipation, meteorism, epistaxis, hemorrhoidal flux, congestions of the head, increasing fugitive sensations of heat (hot flushes), and a tendency to profuse perspiration. |
| Vague gossip implies
increased mortality |
Vague gossip inclines some women to believe that the menopause is a “dangerous” time for them, and that they are likely to die. (This is not so. They are more likely to die in the prime of their lives when bearing children.) But even Dr. Kisch is bound to acknowledge that this is not so and says: “It is often asserted that in this ‘critical period of the menopause, the mortality of the female sex is notably increased. The data available are somewhat conflicting, but a careful examination leads us to believe that if due allowance is made for the natural increase in the mortality with advancing years, no important increase in the mortality of women can be traced as due to the troubles and disturbances of the climacteric period.” |
| Doctors
lack of
imagination |
Medical practitioners gynecologists in particular, seem almost incapable of imagining a healthy woman. For example, the 1934 edition of Dr.Blair Bell s famous Gynecology says: “Very few women pass through the menopause without some general discomforts. The slighter these are the more normal the process; but since such manifestations are almost universal in women, we are forced to consider them normal to her present stage of evolution and conditions of life.... The hot flushes and cold shivers . . . seem to be invariable symptoms of the menopause. |
| 90%
of women had
no work interruption |
This directly ignores
the findings of the women medicals, published by the Women s Medical Federation
in the Lancet of January 1933, which showed that 15.8 per cent passed through
the menopause without any symptoms whatever, and 90 per cent (i.e. 900
out of 1,000 investigated) had carried on right through the phase of the
menopause without a single interruption of work or routine due to any “symptoms,”
- a much more cheering and more truthful ppicture than is painted by others.
One is glad to find even Dr. Blair Bell concede the truth that “it is important to remember in regard to the menopause that all treatment must be directed to ‘tiding over, and to mitigation only of the bad symptoms, until such time as the metabolism shall have been able to readjust itself.” |
| General
health leads
to easier menopause |
In general, one may say that the healthier and more natural the life before the onset of the climacteric, the more easy and natural will be that time when it comes. As one would expect a wife who has experienced a happy and natural sex-life, borne children and nursed them at her breast, should have, all other things being equal, an easier and more natural time than a woman who has missed these happy gifts of nature, and suffered misery and deprivation. |
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| Sexual
activity
affects ovaries |
The deeply wise Spanish expert, Dr. Maranon (The Climacteric, London, 1929) sets this out clearly and with precision (his p. 86) when he says: “The way in which the woman exercised her sexual activity reacts directly on the endocrine activities of the ovary. The crisis will not be the same in a woman who has borne children as in one who was sterile. It will not be the same in one who has conceived a discreet number of times as in another who has been weakened by an excessive number of pregnancies; nor the same in one who made an unnatural use of her sexual activity as in one who exercised it in the tranquil atmosphere of her own home, Still less similar will it be in the woman who reaches the menopause in a state of chastity. And within this last group it will differ in her who remained celibate without emotional struggle (because of the frigidity of her temperament or through the voluntary abstinence of a religious devotee) from the crisis in another who remained so by necessity because of the social conditions which keep so many women of perfect sexual aptitude in an enforced spinsterhood.” |
| "Revolutionary advice" | The most important,
the most useful, and strange though it be, the most revolutionary advice
I can give to women who are entering upon their Change of Life is: not
to worry, to be the mistress of their emotions and to carry on exactly
as though nothing special were happening. This is revolutionary because
so far as I can discover almost everyone who publishes advice on this subject
emphasises the need of all sorts of restrictions that the woman must impose
upon herself in her diet, her general habits and her pleasures. Some of
the penalties imposed by the pundits (see p. 128) on women at this time
are monstrous and a few will be specified presently. Here I want to emphasise
that the major factor in this period which has been made artificially miserable
for myriads of women, is the mind. The woman s own mental attitude towards
herself and others at this time really is the controlling factor, and more
women have suffered troubles at this time as a result of anticipating them
than would ever have suffered them had they gone unaware into the perfectly
natural phase which the menopause represents.
A little learning is a dangerous thing, and judging by their exhortations most writers for climacteric women have very little knowledge of health and sanity and their exhortations are often extremely dangerous to women. So in black print I am going to emphasise: |
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