Susan Mattern | A History of Menopause and Menopause in History

Are the ways we look at menopause all wrong? In The Slow Moon Climbs, Susan Mattern argues that menopause was the prerequisite for human civilisation as we know it. The "grandmother hypothesis" argues for the importance of elders in rearing future generations, which menopause made possible. Mattern shows that for most of human history, people had no word for menopause. Only around 1700s did we begin to see menopause as a pathological condition that rendered women weak and vulnerable. Mattern argues that menopause was another syndrome, like hysteria or melancholia, that emerged in early modern Europe in tandem with the rise of a professional medical class. 
 

About the Speaker

Susan Mattern is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of History at the University of Georgia. In addition to The Slow Moon Climbs, she has also authored The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire, and Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing. She is a series editor for the Liverpool Studies in Ancient History.