Menopause: who decided it was a phase of decline?

If I asked you to associate one word with menopause, terms such as change, discomfort, fluctuating moods, hot flashes, uncertainty would probably emerge. Words that often accompany this topic, portraying it as an inevitable physical, mental and hormonal decline of women. The same does not happen in the same way with male andropause. And perhaps this is not a coincidence.

Menopause is one of the few stages of female life to have been defined, from its very name, by what ends. The term derives from the Greek mēn (month) and pausis (cessation): the end of menstruation. Already here, an interesting question is hidden: why is a phase that can last for more than thirty years of a woman’s life mainly described as an ending, a loss, a decline?

For centuries, menopause has been observed through a predominantly male medical, cultural and social gaze. It has been associated with lack, fragility, ageing. The female body seemed to lose something: fertility, hormones, youth. And so, slowly, the collective narrative was also built around the idea of subtraction.

Yet today a woman can live in post-menopause for a period equal to, or even longer than, the time spent in her fertile years. We are not talking about the end of life, but about an entire phase of existence. In a society that should no longer attribute women’s value exclusively to their ability to give birth to daughters and sons, this reflection appears more relevant than ever.

Perhaps this is precisely the point: we have learned to consider menopause as a conclusion, when it looks much more like a transformation. This does not mean ignoring its difficulties. The symptoms exist and can have a significant impact on physical and emotional well-being. But reducing menopause to its symptoms would be like describing adolescence exclusively through acne, mood swings or the first episodes of sweating. It would mean losing sight of the broader meaning of change.

During a recent training session on the subject, a gynecologist asked the participants a question that was as simple as it was powerful: if you could rename menopause, what would you call it? Ultimately, this is not only a matter of language. It is a matter of meaning. Because words matter. If for generations we have described this phase as decline, it is not surprising that many women have experienced it as a loss of value, desirability or social relevance. But what would happen if we began to describe it as a second flowering, a new season, a phase of redefinition?

The anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote that “there is no greater power in the world than the enthusiasm of a post-menopausal woman.” A sentence that invites us to look beyond stereotypes. In our culture, female pride is often associated with youth, motherhood or professional achievement. Much less space is given to the pride of later ages, as if experience, awareness and freedom had less value than other achievements.

And yet many women describe this phase as a moment of greater clarity: less conditioned by external expectations, more oriented towards their own needs, freer from having to prove something. Perhaps the pride of menopause does not consist in denying the change in the body. It consists in recognizing that change does not equal a loss of value. There is pride in continuing to redefine oneself. There is pride in inhabiting a changing body without experiencing it as an enemy. There is pride in giving voice to a phase that for too long has been whispered about, medicalized or hidden. Perhaps the real cultural change will begin when we stop asking ourselves what ends with menopause and start asking ourselves what begins.

Because not all transformations are declines. Some are simply new beginnings.