The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause

By Germaine Greer

'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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: May 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781408886397

Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer is a major cultural figure – a writer, an English critic, a literary and media star, and a feminist.

Reviews for The Change

[bookcrazed_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

No stone is left unturned. Greer found something to say about the medicalization of menopause that was not in other books. What is considered state of the art in Britain, France, Australia, and the United States is somewhat different from country to country. Drugs and treatments available in one country are unavailable in others. The pet drug in each country is one produced by a drug company headquartered in that country. The United States, of course, comes out as champion in the medicalization of menopause. Greer did not hesitate to put forth her pet theories in the midst of statistics and reports of double-blind studies. She is very much present in her writing, and the book greatly benefits. Greer believes the second half of life is about becoming spiritual, and the second half of her book is her testimonial of her midlife passage, liberally sprinkled with testimonials from diaries and novels dating back to the 1700s. The reader experiences her passage, from the first chapters with her feminism in full view as she lambasts the medicalization of menopause to the final chapters when she describes her joy on being on the other side of fifty: "Before, I felt less on greater provocation; I lay in the arms of young men who loved me and felt less bliss than I do now. What I felt then was hope, fear, jealousy, desire, passion, a mixture of real pain, and real and fake pleasure, a mash of conflicting feelings, anything but this deep still joy. I needed my lovers too much to experience much joy in our travailed relationships. I was too much at their mercy to feel much in the way of tenderness; I can feel as much in a tiny compass now when I see a butterfly still damp and crinkled from the chrysalis taking a first flutter among the brambles." For those among us who approach our climacteric "alone," Greer makes clear that the relationship with the self can be the most joyous and satisfying of all relationships. (December 1994)

[wishanem · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Did you ever wish to Star Trek was smooshed together with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? This is that, and it made me laugh out loud at least a dozen times.