Hot and Bothered

Women, Medicine, and Menopause in Modern America

Judith A. Houck, Judith A HOUCK

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780674027404
  9780674018969
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674038813
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Gynecology, Obstetrics & Midwifery

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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 “Menopause Is Not a Dangerous Time ”Medicine, Menopause, and the New Woman, 1897–1937
• 2 “Endocrine Perverts” and “Derailed Menopausics” Gender Transgressions and Mental Disturbances, 1897–1937
• 3 “Consider the Patient as a Woman and Nota Group of Glands ”Women, Menopause, and the Medical Encounter, 1938–1962
• 4 “The Change Emancipates Women ”Menopause, Domesticity, and Liberation in the Popular Literature,1938–1962
• 6 “Why All the Fuss?” Middle-Class Women and the Denial of the Menopausal Body,1938–1962
• 7 Feminine ForeverRobert A. Wilson and the Hormonal Revolution, 1963–1980
• 8 “At the Will and Whim of My Hormones” Women, Menopause, and the Hormonal Dilemma, 1963–1980
• 9 “What Do These Women Want?” Feminists Respond to Feminine Forever, 1963–1980
• EpilogueMenopause at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Index