Silent women sufferers: experiences of menopause in 1970s Britain

This article examines a small collection of letters written by readers of the British magazine Nova in January 1975 in response to a call for research participants for a study on menopause. As a case study, the letters show the lived experience of menopause at a time when the subject was rarely discussed and practically invisible within popular culture. I will argue that although many women were beginning to challenge this silence, others were complicit in its maintenance. The views and experiences recounted are both unusual but also significant as a nascent form of activism prompted by the burgeoning women’s liberation movement and feminist health activism of the time. The writers’ experiences of struggle in getting both acknowledgement of and solutions to their menopausal problems illuminate the powerful cultural norms about women, health and menopause that operated at the time and the gendered assumptions that underpinned doctors’ responses to women’s concerns.