The Change
Women, Ageing and the Menopause
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
'A brilliant, gutsy, exhilarating, exasperating fury of a book' New York Times
'Germaine Greer has given women just the book they need for this time of their lives. Read it, pass it on, talk about it, disagree with it, keep the circle going' Washington Post
The seminal, ground-breaking and controversial feminist text on the menopause, revised and updated
When The Change was published in 1991, 'menopause' was a word of fear. Then, as now, expensive magazines advertised even more expensive anti-ageing preparations, none of which worked. Big pharma was pushing replacement hormones, but doctors were dragging their feet. Some women told horror stories of their experiences with replacement hormones; others called them lifesavers.
Nobody knew why some women went through this change of life without difficulty. What was working for them, when other women were tormented almost to madness?
It seemed that we were close to an answer to that question, but that was before large-scale studies revealed that the protective effects of hormone replacement had been vastly exaggerated; given the perceived increase in the risk of life-threatening disease, the studies had to be called off.
Now more than ever, amid the clamour of online chatrooms and promotions for a vast array of alternative therapies, the individual woman has to manage her passage through menopause for herself. In The Change, Germaine Greer provides a common-sense guide to a very interesting and important stage of women's lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Menopause, Greer believes, should be a time of stock-taking, of spiritual as well as physical change, when the middle-aged woman, rejecting the roles held out by patriarchal society, attains a mature serenity and power. In a wise, witty and inspiring book, she rebukes doctors, psychiatrists--and women themselves--who blame the aging female for her menopausal distress. Skeptical of hormone replacement therapy, which she views as a boon to the pharmaceutical industry, Greer asserts that the ``climacteric syndrome,'' marked by depression, fatigue and irritability, is treatable by holistic medicine. Tweaking ``hardy perennials'' like Joan Collins and Helen Gurley Brown who, in Greer's opinion, refuse to grow old gracefully, she urges women to devise their own private ways of marking the menopause and puts forth the Witch and the Crone of history and literature as role models. Greer dispels all manner of myths and misconceptions about menopause. 50,000 first printing; Literary Guild alternate.