The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing by Hannah Dawson

Author:Hannah Dawson [Dawson, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

59.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Born 1929, Berkeley, California, United States of America

Died 2018, Portland, Oregon, United States of America

The Space Crone

1976

The menopause is probably the least glamorous topic imaginable; and this is interesting, because it is one of the very few topics to which cling some shreds and remnants of taboo. A serious mention of menopause is usually met with uneasy silence; a sneering reference to it is usually met with relieved sniggers. Both the silence and the sniggering are pretty sure indications of taboo.

Most people would consider the old phrase ‘change of life’ a euphemism for the medical term ‘menopause,’ but I, who am now going through the change, begin to wonder if it isn’t the other way round. ‘Change of life’ is too blunt a phrase, too factual. ‘Menopause,’ with its chime-suggestion of a mere pause after which things go on as before, is reassuringly trivial.

But the change is not trivial, and I wonder how many women are brave enough to carry it out wholeheartedly. They give up their reproductive capacity with more or less of a struggle, and when it’s gone they think that’s all there is to it. Well, at least I don’t get the Curse any more, they say, and the only reason I felt so depressed sometimes was hormones. Now I’m myself again. But this is to evade the real challenge, and to lose, not only the capacity to ovulate, but the opportunity to become a Crone.

In the old days women who survived long enough to attain the menopause more often accepted the challenge. They had, after all, had practice. They had already changed their life radically once before, when they ceased to be virgins and became mature women/wives/matrons/mothers/mistresses/whores/etc. This change involved not only the physiological alterations of puberty – the shift from barren childhood to fruitful maturity – but a socially recognized alteration of being: a change of condition from the sacred to the profane.

With the secularization of virginity now complete, so that the once awesome term ‘virgin’ is now a sneer or at best a slightly dated word for a person who hasn’t copulated yet, the opportunity of gaining or regaining the dangerous/sacred condition of being at the Second Change has ceased to be apparent.

Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life’s over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness. Curiously, this restriction of significance coincided with the development of chemicals and instruments that make fertility itself a meaningless or at least secondary characteristic of female maturity. The significance of maturity now is not the capacity to conceive but the mere ability to have sex. As this ability is shared by pubescents and by postclimacterics, the blurring of distinctions and elimination of opportunities is almost complete. There are no rites of passage because there is no significant change.

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