Five years of watching the conversation around menopause change
In 2019 I had an idea for a book about perimenopause and midlife – (almost all) publishers told me no one was interested in middle-aged women. This week one was named a National Book Award finalist
This has been quite a week for menopause on both sides of the Atlantic.
On Monday in the UK, the BBC aired a Panorama documentary, fronted by respected broadcaster Kirsty Wark. The Menopause Industry Uncovered, examined the explosion of growth in the menopause industry (pink tea, anyone?) and the role in particular of menopause specialist Dr Louise Newson. Wherever you stand on Dr Newson – and she has as many admirers as detractors – I know many women who say she (and by extension HRT (or MHT, Menopausal Hormone Therapy, if you’re in the states)) changed their lives when they couldn’t get help anywhere else. This documentary aired on BBC1 at 8pm, primetime on the UK’s biggest terrestrial channel. A sure sign that the menopause conversation has finally hit the mainstream.
Then, on Tuesday, Miranda July’s astonishing novel, All Fours, became a National Book Awards finalist in the states. In case you haven’t read it, All Fours is a stunning, more-radical-than-it-ought-to-be examination of what it means to be a woman in midlife/perimenopause, who finds herself questioning every single thing life has told her she ought to want, need even, to feel fulfilled, and starting to build her own roadmap. It’s barely six months since I interviewed Miranda ahead of publication on both sides of the Atlantic, and I think it’s fair to say she was, understandably, subsumed with pre-publication terror. She had put herself out there, big time. She had admitted she had a birthday that started with a five (which shouldn’t be any sort of a deal, but still is). She had dared to question what life, love, sex, success, mother- and daughterhood looked like, felt like, meant for women at this life stage and she wasn’t sure of the reception she would get. “Will you have my back?” she asked. I assured her we would. And how.
When the news was announced yesterday, she wrote this on Instagram: “What I wondered, the whole time I was writing the book, was *Will they have my back?* If I go out on this limb, will I find myself very alone? Will I be dismissed, belittled and shamed for believing these topics are important? It was a bet I placed not on myself but on YOU. You’d have to be willing to talk about yourself or else I would seem like the only one. Four months later it’s a different world. My back? What a laugh. I’m not alone, I never was.”
On Wednesday, a report was released by the NHS Confederation announcing (what many of us already knew) that tens of thousands of women are unable to work in England because of menopause symptoms. 60,000 to be precise. Sixty. Thousand. Women. Out of work because they can’t get the support they need to manage their symptoms. Yes, I know it’s expensive and the NHS is strapped for cash. But you know what else is expensive? the £1.5billion lost to the economy as a result. (And as writer and broadcaster Louise Minchin put it in this week’s episode of The Shift podcast, “these women are the literal backbone of the NHS”...)
And, as I write this it is still only Wednesday. Menopause has featured large online and in the national press every day, one way and another. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
If I cast my mind back to 2019, 52-year-old Sam’s head would be spinning, because this time five years ago I had just been told, repeatedly, that nobody was interested, in no particular order, in: menopause, middle-aged women, or books featuring them.
If I’m honest, it came as a shock both to me and my then-agent. That’s hubris for you. We had thought we were on to something. (We were, of course, but timing is everything and our timing was off.) Fleabag had just happened. Or more specifically Kristin Scott Thomas playing Belinda in an episode of Fleabag had just happened, setting a spark, if not alight, then at least smouldering.
“The menopause comes and it is the most wonderful fucking thing in the world. Yes, your entire pelvic floor crumbles and you get fucking hot and no-one cares, and then… you’re free. No longer a slave, no longer a machine, with parts. You’re just a person… It’s horrendous. But then it’s magnificent.”
Belinda (Kristin Scott Thomas), Fleabag
So, we sent out the pitch for the book, The Shift – a personal manifesto about the shit and the shift of midlife and perimenopause – and it was met with enthusiasm from (female) editors. Yay! Then it went to acquisitions meetings and everything changed. The “we really want to publish this book” fizzled overnight into the aforementioned nobody’s interested in middle-aged women blah blah blah. Several editors told us straight out that the sales directors (not all but many male) didn’t see who would buy it. I know right?
Luckily for me, not all. When The Shift came out a year later (thank you Hannah Black and the team at Coronet Books, part of Hodder) it was met with, let’s say, wary interest. Did we really want to be saying this out loud? At the same time Caitlin Moran was dipping her toe in midlife in More Than A Woman and Gaby Logan launched her The Midpoint podcast. Maybe this was going to be a thing after all. Maybe, y’know, women over 40 did have opinions, concerns, dreams, hanker for information, want a life. Maybe they even… bought books and listened to podcasts!
The following year, Davina McCall proved just that with her smash hit book Menopausing, co-written with Dr Naomi Potter, - selling a quarter of a million copies off the back of two groundbreaking Channel 4 documentaries (Sex, Myths & Menopause and Sex, Mind & Menopause, produced by Kate Muir. And, in the process, getting the blame for a UK-wide HRT shortage that might more accurately have been put down to new border controls created by Brexit… but hey, detail schmetail.
In America, the conversation was slower off the mark, but as ever was led by the formidable
with her book, The Menopause Manifesto (and her fantastic substack, if you don’t follow her I highly recommend).The following year, a group of women led by Mariella Frostrup launched The Menopause Mandate in the UK and the silence in the mainstream press was broken in the US by the New York Times, Women Have Been Misled About the Menopause.
Actress Naomi Watts launched Stripes. Yes, an actress whose day job depends on her being “ageless” launched a menopause business. (She also prompted an avalanche of midlife Hollywood types investing in “femtech”… but that’s an essay for another time.) Michelle Obama “opened up” about menopause on her podcast and Oprah was hot on her heels. Soon everyone was talking about hot flashes, palpitations, insomnia, loss of self… you name it. Suddenly it was not shaming to “admit” to being menopausal. It was not the end but, whisper it, a new beginning.
And all the while, Miranda July was navigating her own way through perimenopause and turning it into award-garnering fiction.
That’s a whistle stop tour, of course. In no way remotely comprehensive. Very edited highlights, if you like. I merely set out to show what a difference five years has made. Menopause has made its way out of the women’s magazines (where it was forced to languish at the back if it featured at all and never, God forbid, ever, made it to the cover) and on to the front pages. I know plenty of people who wish it would go back into the dark where it belongs. I’m pretty sure they’re marshalling their troops right now. But that’s only to be expected. That’s the price after all of visibility….
We wanted to be part of the conversation, to be seen. For better or worse, we got it. Now we just have to make sure it IS a conversation, not just mud-slinging and blame-gaming, taking sides and building people up and then hacking them down again. Let’s discuss it. Let’s allow that the truth might lie in the messy middle. Let’s talk about menopause and HRT and the alternatives. Let’s talk about it in the context of all the other stresses and strains of midlife – growing children, ailing parents, grief, death, loss, illness, survival. Let’s ensure women – all women, not just middle class white ones who can afford to go private if they’re forced to – are informed. Information, that’s the key. Thats where true power lies. Above all else that’s what I dreamt of when I emerged from the fog of ignorance that surrounded my own perimenopause and set up The Shift.
What a difference five years makes.
Useful Resources:
•
• Newson Health Menopause Clinic.
• Menopause Mandate.
• My Alloy.
• The Shift – how I lost and found myself after 40 and you can too by Sam Baker.
• Menopausing by Davina McCall and Dr Naomi Potter.
• Everything you want to know about menopause, but were afraid to ask by Kate Muir.
• Explore a whole range of Essential Reads for Women Before, During And After The Shift, at The Shift bookshop on bookshop.org.
• Listen to women in the public eye aged 39-103 (!) talking about life before, during and after The Shift on The Shift with Sam Baker podcast, wherever you listen to your podcasts.
* A note: this post contains affiliate links, which means that a very small percentage of any sale goes to help fund The Shift. If it’s orange, it links! (But not all orange links are affiliates…)
Bravo bravo BRAVO! I’m always a little sad and frustrated that you’re not recognised more for your integral part in all of this; of shining a light on this VERY NORMAL part of womanhood and getting it out in the open. I always direct women to The Shift because I’m fiercely proud of what you’ve created, curated and grown over the years. It is needed, it is welcome and it is brilliant. Keep being amazing, Sam xxx
Thank you for writing this. I “discovered” that I was in menopause when I was 40, after my wife and I decided to have a baby. My mother had been 38 and just never told me because she assumed that it wouldn’t have “mattered” since I was a lesbian. Everything changed: work, perception of who I was as a publishing executive, sex, heart health, memory, immune system, how my body was suddenly so different in every possible way, my place in the world. My wife, ten years my senior, went through it simultaneously (no one ever talks about this: two women under the same roof going through it at the same time). And yet: we were both told by the medical establishment in the states, “go home, have a cup of tea and a spa day, and you’ll feel better.” Meanwhile: grief over not being able to have a baby, chronic exhaustion as caregiver for an elder, job loss, sudden invisibility, grief over what I had apparently lost with no sense of what was around the corner, and a body I simply no longer recognized.
When I read this post, I wanted to scream YES, THANK YOU SAM. I mean, wtf does it take for this to finally be a public conversation? How many years?🙏🏻