It's all in your head: Feminist and medical models of menopause (strange bedfellows)

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it addresses the substantive area of menopause. It argues that there has been and continues to be a paucity of literature on the topic, which may be due largely to the stigma associated with aging females in our society. Though some current women's studies literature has addressed itself to this area, menopause is still relatively ignored or poorly researched as compared to menstruation and other feminine physiological issues. Furthermore, the few studies which have emerged from the recent wave of feminist research have tended to perpetuate aspects of the medical model of menopause found in current gynecological textbooks and popular paperbacks, i.e., It's all in your head. This ironic compatibility between medical establishment and feminist models of menopause is the second focus of this article. How such a stance could be shared by two radically different ideological groups is a subject worthy of further analysis because it raises more general questions about the relationship of political ideology to research into human behavior, an issue which is crucial to contemporary studies on sex-role differences.This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the meetings of the American Anthropology Association in Washington, D.C., November 1976. Many thanks to my colleague and friend Judith Katz for her invaluable editorial assistance.