The Slow Moon Climbs: The Science, History, and Meaning of Menopause

by Susan Mattern Narrated by Jennifer Woodward

Overview

The first comprehensive look at menopause from prehistory to today

Are the ways we look at menopause all wrong? Historian Susan Mattern says yes, and The Slow Moon Climbs reveals just how wrong we have been. Taking listeners from the rainforests of Paraguay to the streets of Tokyo, Mattern draws on historical, scientific, and cultural research to reveal how our perceptions of menopause developed from prehistory to today. For most of human history, people had no word for menopause and did not view it as a medical condition. Rather, in traditional foraging and agrarian societies, it was a transition to another important life stage. This audiobook, then, introduces new ways of understanding life beyond fertility.

Mattern examines the fascinating “Grandmother Hypothesis”-which argues for the importance of elders in the rearing of future generations-as well as other evolutionary theories that have generated surprising insights about menopause and the place of older people in society. She looks at agricultural communities where households relied on postreproductive women for the family's survival. And she explores the emergence of menopause as a medical condition in the Western world. It was only around 1700 that people began to see menopause as a dangerous pathological disorder linked to upsetting symptoms that rendered women weak and vulnerable. Mattern argues that menopause was another syndrome, like hysterical suffocation or melancholia, that emerged or reemerged in early modern Europe in tandem with the rise of a professional medical class.

The Slow Moon Climbs casts menopause, at last, in the positive light it deserves-not only as an essential life stage, but also as a key factor in the history of human flourishing.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Winner of the PROSE Award in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, Association of American Publishers

Kirkus Reviews

2019-06-30
A celebration of menopause as a life stage vital to our species' survival, but one that has now been trivialized as a disease to be treated.

Mattern (History/Univ. of Georgia; The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire, 2016, etc.) begins by noting that menopause—the end of the reproductive phase of female life and the beginning of an extended period of aging—is rare outside of humans. Most female animals die within a few years of their last birth, including our primate relatives. The author elaborates on the "grandmother hypothesis." Older women are more experienced, and, freed from giving birth themselves, they can assist daughters in childbirth and child-rearing. In Paleolithic times, when roving bands survived by foraging, these elders knew where to find the good plants. They also added to the number of adults as resources as opposed to dependent children. Menopausal women continued to be important in agrarian times when families settled on farm plots and society became patriarchal, with fathers owning the land and ruling the family. There were booms and busts over that 10,000-year period, and Mattern discusses the forces that kept population levels relatively stable. Everything changed with the Industrial Revolution and the advent of modern medicine, ushering in the modern era of massive population growth and lowered mortality. While menopause has been recognized as a stage of life for thousands of years, it was only in the early 18th century that the term began to incorporate negative ideas of excess blood, hysteria, irritable nerves, and so on. By the time hormones were discovered, menopause was considered an estrogen deficiency disease. The last third of the book embodies Mattern's well-argued case that menopause could be considered a "cultural syndrome": a set of symptoms, largely unclear in origin, that reflect psychological, social, and physiological factors that can create real problems and suffering.

A wise history of a subject that is "deeply…implicated in the human condition."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173480972
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	09/24/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	942,722

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