Women's Day Special: Why menopause may be a good thing
Who is best suited to write about the topic of 'female menopause'?
Naturally, women who have gone through menopause, such as Susan P. Mattern, a researcher in history at the University of Georgia in the United States, who has written a book, The Slow Moon Climbs: The Science, History, and Meaning of Female Menopause.
Susan Mattern wants to challenge the 'common sense' about menopause. Is menopause really a disease? Is it possible that the early loss of fertility in women is not a 'mistake', but an 'advantage'?
Menopause is an evolutionary advantage
Of all the animals in the world, only three are known to have menopause - orcas, short-finned pilot whales, and humans.
The rest of the animals can reproduce until they die. Take our close relative, the chimpanzee, for example. Chimpanzee fertility peaks at 25 to 30 years of age and then gradually declines, reaching zero at about age 50. But 50 years is also about the limit of chimpanzee lifespan; in the wild, chimpanzees naturally live about 40 years, and only a few live to 50 years. Chimpanzees do not have menopause. The day they lose their fertility is almost the day they die of old age.
But human women have a long life span after they lose their fertility, not a year or two, but a decade or two. Most women lose their fertility (no more children are born) around the age of 45, have their last period around the age of 50, and can live up to 70 years. In other words, after the loss of fertility, women still have a third of their lives to live.
Continuing to live a long time after childbirth is a natural setting for human women, not a counter-intuitive renewal of life by modern medicine.
Susan Mattern suggests that menopause is not a disease, not a mistake, but a natural human life cycle and reproductive strategy, and may even be one of the key reasons "why humans are so successful".
We humans have several characteristics: long childhood, long life span, short birth intervals, intensive investment in offspring, and permission for multiple children ...... These characteristics are all related to menopause. Together, these characteristics have given us humans the unique competitiveness that ultimately allowed us to conquer the planet.
Old grandmother conquers the four seas
The first person to suggest that "grandmothers are the core competency of human beings" was an anthropologist, Kristen Hawkes, who observed the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania, and discovered a different pattern of sustenance:
It wasn't men who provided and women who consumed. Rather, adults provide and young children consume.
Males do go hunting and bring back prey, but the harvest is inconsistent.
Postmenopausal females, females of childbearing age, and even teenage children, all participate in foraging. Females with nursing children also spend only less time foraging, not no foraging at all.
Females and children bring back fruits, baobab fruits, underground tubers and honey, which are important sources of food. Without the food brought back by women, it is impossible to feed the existing children.
Menopausal women spend a great deal of time foraging for food, and they are also able to handle underground tubers that are difficult to find and have to be complicated to process before they can be eaten. In addition, menopausal women are the mainstay of assisting women of childbearing age with their children. Every breastfeeding woman has at least one menopausal female helper.
When the proportion of children in a group is too high, there are not enough adults to provide for the children, and the child mortality rate is bound to rise rapidly. In the long history of mankind, "population aging" is not the most frightening thing, but "significant population ageing" is.
In bad years, the labor of menopausal women makes it easier for existing children to survive, and the population stabilizes. In good years, menopausal women help to feed their children, allowing women of childbearing age to wean quickly and have new children, and the population expands rapidly.
Even in modern times, menopausal grandmothers remain a powerful guarantor of child survival. In rural Finland and Canada in the 18th and 19th centuries, menopausal women over the age of 50 had an average of two additional grandchildren for every additional 10 years of life. In rural Gambia in the mid-20th century, children whose maternal grandmothers were still alive were 10% more likely to live to age 5.
If the loss of female fertility is not a curse but a blessing, and even the key to Homo sapiens' global conquest ...... then why do we now regard menopause as a disease?
To answer this question, Susan Mattern examines how menopause has been perceived in different times and cultures and finds that in many cultures there is no concept of 'menopause' at all - people certainly know about menopause, but there is no deliberate word for the 'set of symptoms that come with it'.
In some places, women even feel good about menopause - no longer having the heavy burden of raising young children, no longer having to deal with troublesome periods every month, and no longer having to think about the taboos associated with menstruation. As women age, their status rises, while their energy and intellect are still at their peak. Menopause does not mean "withering away", but rather it is the beginning of the most free and beautiful time of life.
Menopause is not the end of life. In evolution, menopause is one of the least burdensome and most productive stages of a woman's life. Menopausal women were, and still are, the backbone of human society.
Susan Mattern's book, "The Slow Moon Climbs" takes its title from the poet Tinnigan's "Ulysses" -
"The long day wanes；
The slow moon climbs；
The deep Moans round with many voices.
Come, My friends.
It is not too late to seek a newer world.
This is a poem about middle age, but it is also a poem about menopause for women. Menopause is an open and energetic stage of life. The long day will end, but the slowly rising moon will light the way for a new journey.
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