Menopause is a universal biological event experienced by all women who reach middle age. By definition, menopause is the cessation of menses, and marks the beginning of the period of life during which a woman is no longer able to reproduce. The experience of menopause, phenomenologically, psychologically, socially, and spiritually, however, is dependent on one's cultural context. The multi-variant relationship between the individual and his or her culture serves to explain why women in Japan, for example, tend to have more positive menopausal experiences and suffer from different symptoms that do women in North America (Lock 1993). In short, the individual's experiences are colored by specific cultural constructions. These cultural constructions provide meanings, definitions, and context. The individual's experiences, which are individual and specific, in turn influence the dominant paradigms. There is a continuous dialectic at work on several levels of experience and knowledge. Griffen comments on the unique relationship between the individual and his or her context: 

Herein, of course, lies one of the keys to relationships between an individual and her or his culture: certain physiological changes occur universally in the human organism during the life cycle, but, intimate and idiosyncratic though they may be, they are never experienced de novo. These changes occur only through a filter of cultural expectations, and for the most part they are experienced in conformity with those expectations (1982: 257).

      What follows is not only a study of how a dominant cultural construction of menopause (the biomedical model) can affect menopausal women's experiences, but also an opportunity to examine how women are active agents in their orientation and experience of menopause. Specifically, the bulk of the ethnographic material contained herein is focused on the various ways women resist the disease model of menopause and how they understand menopause on their own terms. A running theme throughout this entire study is the concept of women defining their own experiences and challenging the application of exogenous labels and constructions. Unlike most of the literature that is currently available, this project aims to focus on women's personal experiences. Special emphasis is placed on their voices and their messages as they were relayed to me through the interviews. 

      Eight women were interviewed for this study. Seven were either peri-menopausal or menopausal. One was many years past menopause. The age range of the informants was from forty-three to seventy-five years of age. Since the initial focus of this project was on the role of support groups in the menopause experience, six of the eight informants were contacted via the Internet. A message describing my project was posted on the electronic bulletin boards of two on-line menopause support groups. Two of the eight women were contacted through one, and the remaining four were contacted through the other. The two remaining informants were related to a personal friend and were contacted through that friend. All informants were given a detailed informed consent form and all but two interviews were tape-recorded. The two unrecorded interviews were conducted by email at the request of the participants. Interviews were conducted from November 2000 to February 2001. A list of twenty-six questions was used to guide the interviews although some questions may have been modified and/or omitted over time (See Appendix for interview questions). The purpose of the questions was to gage exactly how the medical model of menopause affects women and to assess their opinions on various menopause-related issues.

     Part I of this paper is a thorough historical and sociological review of the medicalization of menopause. The experiential and theoretical ramifications of the biomedical model of menopause are discussed and the importance of social context in the menopause experience is explored. Specific examples of past and contemporary vernacular and metaphors for menopause are illustrated. The purpose of part I is to create an appropriate context for thinking about women's resistance to the biomedical model. 

      The focus of part II is women's resistance. This is the section where the ethnographic date are introduced and used to illustrate why and how women resist the conceptualization of menopause as a disease. This part of the paper is divided into four sections - rejection of hormone replacement therapy, the challenging of physicians, anger as awareness of medicalization, and menopause as metamorphosis - each of which focuses on a different form of resistance.