Menopause

Menopause in The Second Sex is both a bodily transition and a turning point in women’s socially assigned lives. The decline of ovarian activity can bring physical changes, but the book argues that the crisis also arises from a culture that makes femininity, sexual attractiveness, and service to others central measures of a woman’s worth. The end of reproductive life may release women from certain bodily and domestic constraints; yet the freedom that follows often arrives only after the roles through which society gave them purpose have receded.

Physiological Transition and the Limits of Biological Explanation

The account places menopause within a life course marked by abrupt reproductive transitions. Between forty-five and fifty, ovarian activity diminishes and may cease. The book describes this change as a “vital impoverishment” of the individual, while noting that the thyroid and pituitary glands may compensate for reduced ovarian activity. The transition can involve depression alongside hot flashes, high blood pressure, and nervousness; sex drive may increase, some women retain fat, and others acquire traits described as masculine. In some cases a new endocrine balance develops. The discussion does not present one uniform course: its effects vary, and the physiological change can be accompanied by renewed health, balance, and vigor.

This variation matters to the argument. Menopause is unlike puberty in its direction, but both are treated as decisive bodily passages rather than smooth, continuous developments. The book describes the reproductive arc as more erratic and discontinuous for women than for men, with puberty, sexual initiation, and menopause forming major crises. Women may lose fertility and sexual attraction while still having approximately half of adult life ahead of them. The transition’s importance, however, is not reducible to bodily symptoms: its “symbolic value” gives those symptoms much of their force.

The book also insists that the body cannot by itself explain women’s social position. Biological facts are essential to understanding women’s situation, but they do not establish a sexual hierarchy, explain why women are made the Other, or condemn them to subordination. A body has lived meaning through consciousness, action, and society; what matters is not simply reproductive capacity but how history and social arrangements interpret it. This qualification frames the discussion of menopause: physiological change is real, yet the crisis attached to it is intensified by the meanings society assigns to femininity and age.

The Social Meaning of Aging

For women whose lives have not been staked chiefly on femininity, the end of menstruation can bring relief. Women absorbed in work at home or outside it may welcome the end of menstrual demands; peasant and working wives facing repeated pregnancies may be glad when that risk is over. In these cases, the transition need not carry the same psychological weight. The book locates much of women’s distress not in the body alone but in an anxious consciousness of it, and says that the moral drama may begin before the physiological changes and continue long after they have ended.

The pressure is especially severe for women whose security and standing depend on being desirable. The book contrasts the mature man, whose face and body do not exhaust his prospects of seduction or achievement, with the woman, who has been taught to depend on sexual appeal and male mediation. It places women’s fullest sexual blossoming at about thirty-five, when desire may be strongest, then describes the fear of losing a hold on a husband, protection, or success in work as the body changes. Dyes, peeling, and plastic surgery can prolong the appearance of youth, but cannot stop the process. For a woman who has built her life around the body as an object of approval, aging threatens not only appearance but the means through which she has been permitted to act in the world.

The impact is not the same for every woman. The woman who has been absorbed in devotion and sacrifice may be more abruptly shaken than one who has already been intensely attentive to her appearance and anticipated its decline. When the former finds herself outside the shelter of familiar projects, she may look back on her life as narrow and disappointing, feel that her opportunities were taken from her, and discover that her husband, surroundings, and occupations did not answer her sense of possibility. She may begin keeping a diary, confide in sympathetic women, revisit missed opportunities, and imagine alternative versions of her past. The transition thus turns attention backward as well as forward: what had once seemed a settled life becomes an object of judgment.

Attempts at a New Beginning

The book describes a counter-movement to this retrospective crisis. Some women try to rescue what they regard as a wasted existence by acting on desires previously deferred: a maternal woman may seek another child, a sensual woman a new lover, and a coquette renewed admiration. They may insist that they have never felt so young, dress younger, or behave with a deliberately girlish charm. Such gestures are not simply vanity in the account. They express an attempt to stop time, regain agency, and begin again, even as they deny the autonomy and experience that age has brought.

The crisis can also blur the distinction between inner conviction and external reality. A woman who feels young while seeing herself as old may no longer reconcile her sense of self with the image in the mirror. The book links this division to feelings of depersonalization, a weakened hold on ordinary landmarks, and a readiness to trust inward proof over a world that seems to have betrayed her. Because love remains an intense preoccupation, some women may persuade themselves that they are loved; the text notes that nine out of ten erotomaniacs are women and that most are between forty and fifty. This claim belongs to the book’s period-specific psychological framing, not a timeless rule about women or aging.

For others, religion supplies a framework for interpreting disappointment. A woman who feels deprived of human love may regard her wasted life as a trial, understand misfortune as a source of spiritual distinction, or believe that she has been entrusted with a mission. The book describes a heightened openness to spiritual guides, religious groups, prophets, healers, and other authorities when a woman longs for a definitive truth or a remedy that will make her life intelligible. It presents these responses as part of the same search for renewal: menopause can seem to divide life in two and open onto a new time, in which a woman may give herself over to love, life, God, art, or humanity.

That apparent rebirth does not alter the external world. The heights remain out of reach, messages remain difficult to interpret, and moments of fervor are followed by depression. The book relates these oscillations both to bodily changes and to a psychological effort to defend against the irreversibility of the past. Grievances and regrets may return; suspicion may turn into fantasies of persecution, and jealousy may focus intensely on a husband’s friends, sisters, or work. The transition therefore offers no simple passage from constraint to liberation: an imagined new life can coexist with a painful recognition of what cannot be recovered.

Freedom, Retirement, and the Book’s Argument

A decisive change occurs when a woman agrees to grow old rather than continue fighting the passage of time. The book describes her as becoming a different, asexual yet complete person. That change does not end the struggle; it begins another, the effort to keep a place in the world. She may use age to refuse burdensome chores, cease to be intimidated by a husband she knows well, and establish a life alongside him based on friendship, indifference, or hostility. If he declines more quickly, she may take the lead in the relationship. She may also reject fashion, public opinion, diets, and beauty treatments. The example of Léa, who is freed from dressmakers, corset makers, and hairdressers and settles into enjoying food, makes the change concrete. As children grow up, marry, and leave home, the demands of care may also lessen, allowing a woman to discover a measure of independence.

Yet the timing of that independence exposes the larger social contradiction. Women, the book argues, often find freedom when they can find little to do with it. At fifty, a woman may possess strength and experience at the very point when a man advances toward important positions and work while she is pushed into retirement. Trained to devote herself, she may find that no one now requires her devotion. Her apparent release from reproductive and family service does not automatically provide a new project, public role, or recognized purpose; instead, it can leave her facing long years that seem to have no promise.

The discussion thus returns to the book’s existential distinction between immanence and transcendence. A person’s present existence is justified through projects and through movement toward an open future; when freedom is confined to repetition or reduced to a fixed social role, it is degraded into immanence. The general argument is that women are autonomous freedoms, yet men’s authority can force them to assume the position of the Other. Menopause reveals the cost of that arrangement across a lifetime: a woman may be released from certain bodily and domestic demands only when the world has already denied her the occupations and social recognition through which to make that release meaningful. The chapter’s ending gives this contradiction its bluntest form, as the woman who is no longer needed confronts the years still ahead of her.