When did being a woman become a special condition?
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Version 0 of 1. It remains a key argument for the kind of person who calls Harriet Harman "Harriet Hormone", that female biology is at odds with high office, quite possibly with serious responsibility of any kind. With his advice to "calm down dear", to a senior Labour irritant, and another joke about her "frustration" to a tiresome female on his own side, even the prime minister has sometimes indicated that unevolved woman has done little to inspire confidence, biologically speaking, since, 1912, when a doctor and anti-suffragist, Sir Almroth Wright, despaired of the "militant hysteria" of London's suffragettes. "No doctor can ever lose sight," Sir Almroth wrote to the Times, "of the fact that the mind of a woman is always threatened with danger from the reverberations of her physiological emergencies" – meaning periods. "It is with such thoughts that the doctor lets his eyes rest upon the militant suffragist. He cannot shut them to the fact that there is mixed up with the women's movement such mental disorder, and he cannot conceal from himself the physiological emergencies, which lie behind." And the biological risks do not, as Sir Almroth well knew, stop there. The middle-aged Mrs Thatcher's behaviour was attributed by a foreign politician to "the glandular system of women"; a like-minded US doctor, Edgar Berman, physician to Hubert Humphrey, told women Democrats that political ambition was incompatible with their biology. What, he asked, would have happened if a "menopausal woman president" had been around during the (failed) Bay of Pigs invasion? The same went for women airline pilots. "Now," Dr Berman said, "anything can happen, knowing women, psychologically during this period, or during their lunar problem. Anything can happen from going up and eating the paint off the chairs…", at which he was interrupted by a furious congresswoman. But that was in the 70s: to the modern ear, accustomed to hear "menopausal" used quite freely to disparage anything from an Australian prime minister to a flagging chainstore (the Economist on Marks & Spencer: "Magic or menopausal?"), it must seem outlandish that Berman would go on to lose his job for expressing doubts that are often, inadvertently or not, endorsed by women themselves. It was a woman who went on the radio to call Julia Gillard a "menopausal monster". Rihanna called a woman critic a "sad sloppy menopausal mess". Coming from a more benign place, the National Union of Teachers recently debated the allegedly special needs of menopausal teachers, some of whom were depicted in a resolution as "not being able to finish a sentence". For reasons that remain mysterious, the TUC identifies a menopausal need for special breaks and sanitation. Jeanette Winterson, while still mistress of her sentences, advertises the disastrous potential of hormones. Take progesterone. "In balance, it makes us feel confident and positive," she said. "Out of balance, women get weepy and anxious." Tricky then, on those days when you feel weepy and anxious, can't imagine why, but can't raise the £380 for a new-patient appointment with Winterson's hormone guru, one Dr Marion Gluck, of Wimpole Street. Doctor Gluck, you gather, has no truck with studies that have shown no clear link between negative moods – or PMS – and the menstrual cycle, to the point that, when men were included in one control group, their reported symptoms did not differ from pre-menstrual women's. In the nicest possible way, she appears to have more in common with Sir Almroth. "Whether," she writes (under the empowering heading It Must Be My Hormones), "it's realising that you're at that time of the month when you cry at adverts on the television or when you get a parking ticket, or the rollercoasters of puberty, pregnancy and menopause, 99.9% of women have felt a slave to their hormones at some point in their lives." An admirably neat but fairly catastrophic summary of female existence then, even before you factor in the period pains much featured in last week's debates about paid menstrual leave, a scheme supported by 38% of the voters in a Guardian poll. Originating in 1940s Japan, menstrual leave turns out to be an entitlement in several Asian countries. It might be as much as two days off per month, sometimes with additional pay for women who do not take their biological due: an ingenious solution to the sort of problems raised by Sir Almroth and Berman – supposing non-ovulating colleagues do not start claiming similar allowances for migraines, hay fever, SAD etc. On the other hand, this formal confirmation that all women employees, and not just the minorities who regularly suffer from crippling pains or the acute premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), require special treatment – until such time as they begin struggling with sentences – has to be a mixed blessing, professionally. In fact, were it not that attitudes to menstruation vary from one culture to another, western trade unionists might want to raise with Asian colleagues the downside of pathologising the experience of half the working population any more than is already encouraged by the manufacturers of useless oils and tablets. As things stand, it's possible that Japanese women experience their periods differently, as particularly disabling, while they appear to regard the menopause as far less of a "rollercoaster", to borrow from Dr Gluck, than do western women. No disrespect to the women asking for more consideration in schools, or the TUC's new advice on "menopause-related sickness absence", but Gluck's rollercoasters seem to be anything but universal. Not only has the anthropologist Professor Margaret Lock's study of Japanese and American subjects revealed experiences of entirely different symptoms – Japanese shoulder stiffness, say, as opposed to US hot flushes – but US studies have also indicated that menopause is not "particularly difficult" for the majority of women. "These positive experiences need to be publicised much more," Lock has said. Indeed they should, no matter what problems such a de-stigmatising process might create for below-the-line political analysts and the Economist's adjective-strapped headline writers. But as with attempts to banish the culture-bound construct of PMS, any attempt to separate the menopause from its more disabling connotations could face as much resistance from women, conditioned to self-identify as forgetful, anxious, tired, irritable etc, as it would from the pharmacists and clinicians squabbling over the proceeds of medicalisation. Paternalistic doctors are not alone, as extensive support for menstrual leave makes clear, in regarding femaleness as an illness. And maybe the reporting of the NUT menopause debate sheds some light on this ostensibly perverse behaviour: women can expect a more sympathetic hearing if they inventorise menopausal embarrassments (many of which would be equally familiar to forgetful, irritable etc middle-aged men) than if they complain about the age-related female invisibility and marginalisation with which the climacteric generally coincides. But no doubt such debates change attitudes. Maybe the next time Theresa May gets terrifying with the police, someone will be kind enough to take her away for a lie-down. |