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Menopause and Emotions: Making Sense of Your Feelings When Your Feelings Make No Sense. By Lafern Page. Vancouver, British Columbia: Primavera Press, 1993.
Women of the Fourteenth Moon: Writings on Menopause. Edited by Dena Taylor and Amber C. Sumrall. Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1991.
These books offer a refreshing, deeply textured, feminist view of menopause based upon women's experiences. Like Rosetta Reitz in 1977, Lafern Page gathered women together to share stories, analyzed them, and presented various ways women perceived and dealt with emotions during menopause.(1) Dena Taylor and Amber C. Sumrall collected menopausal women's journal entries, essays, poems, and fantasies. The contributors' creative thinking in both books pours forth as raw material for a radical new metaphor of menopause as transformation. It is radical because these women are not merely reacting to the medicalization of menopause--the making of a normal bodily experience into a disease--but are collectively asking the question: "What positive function can menopause serve?" These two books present nonacademic views that feminists might want to consider as alternatives to the dominant medical model, the feminist attack on this model, and feminist self-help perspectives.
In the discourses on menopause in our culture, the medical model still reigns supreme. Its metaphor of menopause as a "deficiency disease," complete with symptoms that require treatment, has increasingly marginalized all other views, including feminist perspectives. Medicalization occurs when human experiences are defined as medical problems to be treated by medical personnel. Sociologist Susan E. Bell elaborates the three levels of medicalization:
On the conceptual level, medicalization occurs when a medical vocabulary or model is used to define a problem. On the institutional level, medicalization comes about when professionals legitimate an organization's work, serving as "gatekeepers" or "formal supervisors." On the level of doctor-patient interaction, medicalization occurs when individual physicians define or treat patients' complaints as medical problems.(2)
In my own analysis of the social construction of menopause as disease, I stress such historical, political, and economic factors as the creation of a submissive female patient, the role of the Food and Drug Administration in approving hormone treatments for menopause, and the marketing of estrogen by physicians and pharmaceutical companies.(3)
Feminist academic scholarship on menopause has emerged from various disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, psychology, psychiatry, English,...