Perimenopause

Menopause, in this account, is more than the end of fertility: it is a sharp break in a life that society has organized around women’s reproductive functions and sexual value. The transition may release a woman from pregnancy and prescribed service, yet the freedom it opens arrives within a culture that has often taught her to justify her existence through femininity, marriage, and devotion. The resulting crisis is physiological, psychological, and social at once—and its defining contradiction is that a woman may become freer just as she is treated as no longer needed.

A discontinuity in women’s lives

The account describes women’s lives as more closely tied to physiological change than men’s, and their transitions as more abrupt. Puberty, sexual initiation, and menopause stand out as decisive crises; whereas a man is described as aging continuously, a woman may be treated as having abruptly lost femininity while still young. When fertility and sexual attraction have been made to seem like foundations of her prospects and happiness, their decline can leave her feeling as if her future has been taken away even though roughly half of adult life remains.

The significance of the transition, however, depends on the life organized around it. Women who have not staked their worth chiefly on femininity may feel it less sharply. For peasant and working wives, in particular, the end of the risk of repeated pregnancy may be welcome relief. The account therefore distinguishes bodily changes from the social and personal meanings attached to them: the crisis begins in anxious anticipation of what menopause signifies and can continue long after its physiological changes have passed.

The body and the meaning assigned to it

This treatment of menopause belongs to a broader argument that biology matters without dictating a woman’s destiny. The body is an essential element of a person’s situation, but it does not by itself determine her identity or social place; its lived meaning takes shape through consciousness, action, and society. The account applies this distinction to reproductive life generally: menstruation can be experienced as alienating, while pregnancy and childbirth may impose serious costs, but those facts do not explain why women are made subordinate.

Menopause makes the social interpretation of bodily change especially visible. A woman who has been taught to rely on sexual attractiveness for protection, marriage, or success may experience aging not simply as change in the body, but as the loss of her means of acting in the world. The contrast is gendered: the mature man is not expected to remain a passive object of attraction, while a woman’s altered appearance is treated as diminishing her possibilities. Her distress thus arises not from physiology alone, but from a social order that has made her access to the world depend on men’s regard.

Crisis, conversion, and disillusionment

The account describes some women turning to religion during menopause, especially when they feel deprived of human love. A life experienced as wasted may be recast as a divine test, and disappointment as preparation for grace. The search for a unifying answer can also make a woman vulnerable to spiritual authorities, sects, prophets, or healers who promise a revelation or a definitive remedy. In this portrayal, religious conviction can offer meaning, but can also become a way to escape a reality that seems closed to her.

Menopause can also create the illusion of a new beginning. The abrupt division between before and after may encourage a woman to invest herself fervently in love, life, God, art, or humanity, as if a different future had opened. Yet the world itself has not changed, and the promised heights remain beyond reach. Moments of exaltation can give way to depression, regret, and suspicion; the account notes that intense jealousy of a husband and rivalry with imagined or actual competitors may become part of this later crisis. The movement between fervor and disillusionment shows how an apparent inner rebirth can conceal the unchanged conditions against which it is struggling.

Freedom after the roles fall away

A further change begins when a woman accepts that she is growing old. The struggle to preserve youth recedes, and she may become more able to refuse the expectations that once governed her: she can avoid burdensome chores, cease to be intimidated by a husband she knows well, shape a separate life through friendship or indifference, and reject fashion and beauty treatments. As children leave home and no longer require her care, she may also be released from duties that had defined her days.

But this freedom arrives late. The account’s example of Léa, whom Chéri finds contentedly freed from the services of dressmakers, corset makers, and hairdressers, makes the change concrete: old age can loosen the hold of prescribed appearance. Yet a woman discovers independence just as the opportunities to use it may have narrowed. The text connects that timing to the social organization of women’s work: patriarchal society has made feminine functions servile, then grants women release from those functions when they are considered no longer productive. A woman in full possession of experience and strength may be pushed toward retirement while men are advancing into their most consequential roles. The account culminates in the question that expresses the cost of this arrangement: “No one needs me!”