Hot and Bothered Women, Medicine, and Menopause in Modern America [Paperback]

How did menopause change from being a natural (and often welcome) end to a woman's childbearing years to a deficiency disease in need of medical and pharmacological intervention? As she traces the medicalization of menopause over the last 100 years, historian Judith Houck challenges some widely held assumptions. Physicians hardly foisted hormones on reluctant female patients; rather, physicians themselves were often reluctant to claim menopause as a medical problem and resisted the widespread use of hormone therapy for what was, after all, a normal transition in a woman's lifespan. Houck argues that the medical and popular understandings of menopause at any given time depended on both pharmacological options and cultural ideas and anxieties of the moment. As women delayed marriage and motherhood and entered the workforce in greater numbers, the medical understanding, cultural meaning, and experience of menopause changed. By examining the history of menopause over the course of the twentieth century, Houck shows how the experience and representation of menopause has been profoundly influenced by biomedical developments and by changing roles for women and the changing definition of womanhood.

Houck&has researched menopausal sentiments expressed by doctors, the popular press and women themselves, from the late-19th century to the present& Much of the information shes unearthed is both horrifying and fascinating.All in all,Hot and Botheredis more than an historical narration of culturally driven gender representation. If it receives the readership it deserves it will help women becomemore genuinelythemselves.Houck takes white, middle-class womens experiences and the complexity of medicine seriously. Activists will find her historical analysis provocative and scholars will be particularly interested in the sources she has identified and examined. Houcks view of menopause certainly complicates both medical and feminist history, proof that this story froml3=