Straight out of university, landing a job as a junior curator at the Royal Museum of Scotland, I was lucky enough to have a female boss. Clever, confident and with one eye determinedly fixed on her progress up the steep incline of the civil service ladder, she was everything I aspired to be. She leaned in, decades before Sheryl Sandberg thought to do the same.
Although desperate to impress her, I quickly lost any professional credibility in her eyes when I was forced to petition her for time off because my periods were abnormally heavy. Once a month, I would appear at her office, deathly pale, practically passing out as a result of extreme blood loss, yet she begrudged sending me home. One time, she explicitly told me I was letting the feminist side down. That stung.
This was in the late 1980s. I am thrilled that today my former boss’s mind-over-matter brand of feminism looks distinctly shabby for failing to take account of women’s lived experience – their bodily reality. Today’s feminists are much more inclined, if not to make a virtue of biology (personally I stop short of an out-and-out celebration of monthly bleeds, or a revelling in labour pains), then at least to make political grist of the practical accommodations that our bodies demand.
I was reminded of my former boss when I read about Andrea Davies’s initiative to make menopause a regular topic of conversation with male colleagues: the female body – once a source of shame, its outlaw flesh forever misbehaving, oozing, bleeding, backfiring and renegading – at long last accorded a little respect. Davies, an academic at Leicester University, wants to encourage men to mention menopause several times a day, as a female-friendly mantra designed to overcome their natural shyness. In the interests of solidarity, she has instituted a Menopause Cafe at work, where co-workers gather over cake to compare notes about the way hot sweats, aphasia (language problems), insomnia, dry vaginas and the ins and outs of HRT might affect women’s sense of wellbeing at work. Male colleagues wanting to better understand how to support their female partners are warmly welcomed.
Menopause Cafes are a thing. Already this year 14 have been set up by working women across the UK, from Perth to Petersfield, following the lead of their founder, Rachel Weiss, a counsellor who was inspired to emerge from the menopause closet after watching Kirsty Wark’s televised struggles with her own suddenly wayward biology. But do Menopause Cafes do enough? Wark is not alone in coming forward to discuss menopause. Kate Garraway, Gillian Anderson and Emma Thompson are among a small army of high-profile women who have made a point of outing menopause. Kim Cattrall became a poster girl for menopause with her series Sensitive Skin, as did Angelina Jolie after publicising the elective double mastectomy and oophorectomy (removal of the ovaries) that plunged her into early menopause.
Jolie, 39 at the time, remarked: “I feel at ease with whatever will come, not because I am strong, but because this is a part of life. It is nothing to be feared.” I thought this statement perfectly picked up on women’s apprehensions over menopause while at the same time dismissing simple-minded notions of female empowerment. As I argue in my memoir The Middlepause, the kind of cheerleading that insists we can become strong by embracing menopause does women few favours, since it makes those of us who suffer and struggle with it feel cowed by failure and self-recrimination. We have a right to complain, damn it.
Still, a combination of top-down and grassroots activism, combined with renewed awareness of women’s vulnerability in the workplace – a byproduct of the #MeToo movement – goes a long way towards improving the treatment of menopausal women in professional life. The key is understanding that accommodating women’s biology does not equate with compromise. Men, your female colleagues are not operating under a handicap!
The next step perhaps is to recognise that we are all of us embodied. It is the human condition. But we are not just meat machines, our bodies mere locomotive vehicles for carrying our minds around. Our physical selves interact with the world at every level.
They are the prime sensors of pleasure and pain, heat and cold. We learn about our environment through our bodies, acquiring a sense of the world we inhabit – how it invites or inhibits our interaction. Our bodies “remember” how to play the piano or ride a bike; they “know” when to cross a busy road. We possess a bodily understanding of whether we have enough spring in our jump to take that narrow bend in a stream. And anyone whose hand has unconsciously caught a falling object dropped from a table top has direct experience of the mysterious way the body navigates its immediate surroundings, without us being the least aware of its proprioceptive talents.
The philosophical underpinnings of the new materialism may not have yet trickled into everyday feminist thinking, but there are plenty of vocal and visible women on the comedy circuit and in popular culture, from Hannah Gadsby to Loose Women, making bodily functions a part of ordinary conversation.
Every woman is individual, of course, and will experience menopause differently. But in my experience, most feel a surge of creative energy in midlife that is directly at odds with the physical and psychological debilitations of menopause. Multitasking like dynamos from dawn to dusk, they are receptive, inventive and curious, while bringing a depth of knowledge to whatever problems work throws their way. It is a shortsighted employer indeed who does not capitalise on this energy surge (what the anthropologist Margaret Mead termed “zest”) that their silverback staff are riding high on – into their 60s and beyond.