Menopause, Social Aspects of

Attitudes toward Menopause

In societies where older women are respected more than younger women are, attitudes toward menopause are more positive than they are elsewhere. For example, in some Asian, African, and Native American cultures, elders are celebrated for their wisdom, experience and longevity, and so women gain rather than lose social status at menopause. Women who live in societies with a positive cultural emphasis on aging report fewer perimenopausal symptoms than do women in societies with youth-oriented cultures. For example, a recent study of women in China showed that they report very few physical symptoms in comparison to women in North America.

The medicalization of menopause (i.e., the cultural belief that menopause is an illness to be treated medically, rather than a natural and necessary developmental transition) contributes to a general, negative attitude toward menopause and expectations that women will suffer and need treatment. Such expectations can cause women to focus on every ache, hot flash, and unusual sensation; worry about them; and thus magnify their importance. Women might also attribute to menopause symptoms that are related to aging in general or to a chronic illness and actually have nothing to do with menopause itself. These misattributions can also make perimenopause seem worse than it is.

Surveys of midlife women have typically shown that women have mixed feelings about menopause. [Page 926]Among the reasons why women see menopause negatively are the loss of fertility, the symptoms that tend to accompany it, the belief that it has come too soon, the fact that menopause is a clear sign of aging, and a sense of being less feminine. Positive aspects of menopause include the end of the bother of managing menstruation, the end of the need for contraceptives, and a general sense of liberation. Older women tend to have more positive views of menopause than younger women do, and older women are more likely than younger women to agree that postmenopausal women feel freer, calmer, and more confident than ever before.

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