For nearly two centuries, women in this country have fought for legal, political, economic, and social equality. Just to feel like we are moving in reverse: the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is frozen in legal limbo, we are re-litigating the right to our own bodies, one in four of us is sexually violated, and we’re still no more than a quarter of the voices in the rooms where decisions get made.
My feminist mind and mouth have been loud my whole life. Looking back, I was always moving towards the science underneath.
I was raised in Italy by an outspoken mother and formidable grandmother; women who not only challenged boundaries, they crossed them. But their strength always came wrapped in a warning: let the men lead, stay more in your place, it’s safer that way. When I emigrated to the US at nine years old, I felt my breath free up. In my early teens, I found Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Magazine, Betty Friedan, and Margaret Atwood. These women inspired me to build a career, a marriage, and a life on my own terms instead of the by rules I’d been taught.
Then perimenopause and menopause hit hard and fast eleven years ago. It shook up the reality I’d built, and started peeling back past gaslighting I hadn’t even clocked.
I had always believed women were central to a community’s wellbeing through their nurturing, communication, and r ability to hold ten things in their heads at once. Then I turned 50 and the nit-picky messages I’d been regularly swatting away multiplied to a deafening swarm. He told me I was becoming less relevant, less visible, less important. This arrived at the exact moment I felt my life lessons and experience had finally made me valuable.
So, I turned to medicine attempting to find symptom relief. If my body felt better, I thought, maybe I could find my way through this societal wall I’d run into. Instead, the prevailing medical view was that women had only lived post fertility in the last few hundred years. That clean water, modern life, and medicine have kept us around past our biological expiration date. That didn’t sit right with me. It sent me, and my documentary filmmaker husband Chris Henze, down a ten-year research rabbit hole.
The science we found is a revolution about how we think about women.
Menopause is not declining. It is an evolutionary transition into the leadership and wisdom phase of a woman’s life. We are the only land mammal whose females live decades past their fertility, and evolution does not carry a costly trait forward for two million years by accident. When our ancestors began organizing around fire, someone had to coordinate the camp: manage food, protect the embers, resolve conflict, hold the group together across generations. Post-menopausal women, freed from the physical demands of fertility, were uniquely built for exactly that job. The groups with more of them survived. Menopause is not a modern mistake. It helped make us human.
Here is why this matters for feminism, and not just menopause.
Women have always instinctively felt their leadership, productive and societal value, beyond just fertility. Generations of us have stood in the hurricane of the patriarchy and spoke that instinct out loud, not knowing if anyone was believing, saying it because it needed to be said. We were right. We just didn’t have the receipts.
Now we do.
This is the difference between fighting for equality and simply acknowledging a fact. A fight assumes the other side gets to decide whether you’re granted a seat. An acknowledgment doesn’t ask permission. For ten thousand years, patriarchy has been a system built with no room for women’s use beyond reproduction and mothering. Women clawed at that system anyway, because the instinct was always telling us what the science is now proving.
Only recently have we started talking openly about menopause. Melinda French Gates recently committed $215 million to women’s health, including $10 million to the Menopause Society. That is generosity worth celebrating, but will it take us where we need to go? If medicine still treats menopause as a modern mistake that needs fixing, then the research it funds, the therapies it develops, and the policies it shapes will all aim at the same broken target: helping women approximate a younger, more fertile version of themselves. The acknowledgment that menopause is the natural transition into a wisdom and leadership time, will create therapies that best support women’s transition into and health in that new phase.
Women over 50 are 70 million strong in the US and Canada alone. We total 51 percent of the population but are still dramatically underrepresented in political decision making, C-suites and the rooms of fiscal power; all at the exact moment our evolutionary design says we should be leading. Climate collapse, poverty, violence, the fraying of community: these are the complex, long-horizon, cooperation-dependent problems post-menopausal women evolved to solve.
My menopausal transition shook up my thinking, my reality, my body. It forged a rewiring of my brain and released layers of societal gaslighting I didn’t even know I still carried. Through that gauntlet I found the science that brings the receipts to the feminist tenets that gave me my wings in the first place.
Rather than pushing against the patriarchy, we need to let it fall away, the way a body finally let’s go of what was never nurturing it. We can build a new system.
About the Author: Dominique Debroux is a producer, entrepreneur, nutritional chef, and co-creator of Wise Women – Humanity’s Untold Originsa documentary reframing menopause as an evolutionary transition into wisdom and leadership. The documentary Wise Women, Humanity’s Untold Origins, is available to rent at bingeable.net/wisewomen.
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