Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause

Remember when you first saw Our Bodies, Ourselves? For me, it was in the women's center at the University of New Mexico in the early 1970's when I was visiting my sister and her friend there. It was a life-changing experience.

Readers familiar with Our Bodies, Ourselves will find the same comprehensive, balanced and empowering approach in this volume. The authors consider menopause within the totality of women's health and as a natural process, not a medical problem. They detail typical menopausal symptoms, mainstream and alternative treatments, and risk factors for such conditions as osteoporosis, heart disease, cancer and diabetes as women age. They explain the biology of menopause; provide up-to-date perspectives on hormone replacement therapy (HRT); discuss sudden and early menopause due to surgery, medical treatments or genetic risk factors; and offer personal reflections by individual women. The sections on how to evaluate research findings; make wise health-care decisions; understand the social, cultural, economic and political frameworks in which women's health care is viewed and formulated; and nurture the self—mind, body and spirit—during years of change on all levels will prove most useful. As a general reference on menopause, this volume will be embraced by a wide female audience.

I co-authored the last chapter, called "Finding Our Power and Organizing for Change". Here are excerpts, both comments from friends who wrote to tell me how they had approached midlife:

"I made a values reassessment at midlife…I had spent a lot of years making money and now I wanted to be with a socially responsible company. The skills I had developed in the business world applied to nonprofits too. I joined a not-for-profit organization where I feel like I can make a difference. A bonus to making this change was the freedom of making decisions for one reason alone—what is the best for the organization and its mission. …. I realized I was not willing to compromise and if it didn’t have that social responsibility, I was not willing to go there.


I was 40 years old before the idea of my having any power at all to determine anything at all occurred to me. For the first 18 years, I responded to my parents’ power; for the next 22, I responded to a husband's power. Little by little over the years I came to realize that I was a marionette, my limbs jerking to whatever strings someone else pulled. Then one fateful day, I cut those strings, fled from a life of privilege but quiet desperation, financially broke, but swelling with my own power to direct my life for the first time. I entered my 40s and began the most productive, satisfying period of my life.