Chronicling The Change

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...