Chronicling The Change

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SUBJECT: MENOPAUSE

THE BOTTOM LINE: To Gail Sheehy, "the change" is a plunge into pathology. To Germaine Greer, it's a spiritual crisis. Both ladies protest too much.

NINETEEN MILLION FEMALE BABY boomers are marching up to that slippery patch of the life cycle once known as "the dangerous age." This is the generation of American women that reinvented feminism, wrote Our Bodies, Ourselves, and learned to examine their cervices with mirrors. But can they prevail over menopause -- the hormonal bog that ate up Ur-feminist Simone de Beauvoir and that reportedly reduces sleek Hollywood women to palpitations and tears?

Menopause is not exactly terra incognita. Edith Bunker dithered through a few hot flashes on All in the Family. Kathy Bates' mood-swinging character in Fried Green Tomatoes tore down walls and built them back up again while Jessica Tandy exhorted her to "take those hormones!" and get on with her life.

But 19 million middle-aged women facing a murky life-cycle transition are, if nothing else, a major book market. Gail Sheehy's slim and chatty menopause book, The Silent Passage (Random House; $16), has been on the best-seller list for 20 weeks. Now comes Germaine Greer's dense, angry meditation, The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause (Knopf; $24). The two books deserve credit for making menopause a word that can be uttered in mixed company, but you don't have to be perimenopausal to experience a full range of symptoms as you work through these books, from hot flashes of rage to the cold sweat of terror.

In Sheehy's The Silent Passage, menopausal women are incapacitated or at least severely derailed by insomnia, loss of libido, hot flashes and depression. At one point Sheehy pauses to ask, "Are we getting all worked up over something that is, in fact, quite normal and has been experienced since time immemorial?" Well, yes -- Japanese women, for example, don't even have a word for "hot flash" -- but never mind. Menopause is a swamp of pathology, in Sheehy's view, curable with a positive attitude and, in appropriate cases, a lifetime supply of Premarin.

No such feel-good stuff for Greer, the former celebrator of liberated sexuality who has grown up to be an avenging angel of radical feminism. Forget sex, she says, especially with those "fat, beefy, beery, smelly" middle-aged men. Forget artificial hormones too, since they are marketed by evil, male- dominated multinational corporations. The only point of agreement between Sheehy and Greer is that menopause is a soul-shattering change, a passage to a new life -- in Sheehy's more upbeat view, a stern confrontation with death; in Greer's scheme, a time to put aside worldly things (coffee and tea as well as sex) and take up witchcraft or, depending on one's tastes, religion.

All this will no doubt reassure the middle-aged woman who has been suffering $ away in silence, wondering if she isn't, perhaps, losing it. But for the woman who's feeling just fine, thank you, who isn't planning to start either a "second adulthood" or a new life as a "crone" (Greer's term), the new menopause genre will read like the ghastly tracts on menstruation that used to be inflicted on girls in the 1950s. Puberty then, like menopause now, was a portal labeled ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.