Encounters with Aging : Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America

Margaret Lock explicitly compares Japanese and North American medical and political accounts of female middle age to challenge Western assumptions about menopause. She uses ethnography, interviews, statistics, historical and popular culture materials, and medical publications to produce a richly detailed account of Japanese women's lives. The result offers irrefutable evidence that the experience and meanings—even the endocrinological changes—associated with female midlife are far from universal. Rather, Lock argues, they are the product of an ongoing dialectic between culture and local biologies. Japanese focus on middle-aged women as family members, and particularly as caretakers of elderly relatives. They attach relatively little importance to the end of menstruation, seeing it as a natural part of the aging process and not a diseaselike state heralding physical decline and emotional instability. Even the symptoms of midlife are different: Japanese women report few hot flashes, for example, but complain frequently of stiff shoulders. Articulate, passionate, and carefully documented, Lock's study systematically undoes the many preconceptions about aging women in two distinct cultural settings. Because it is rooted in the everyday lives of Japanese women, it also provides an excellent entree to Japanese society as a whole. Aging and menopause are subjects that have been closeted behind our myths, fears, and misconceptions. Margaret Lock's cross-cultural perspective gives us a critical new lens through which to examine our assumptions. "Margaret Lock explicitly compares Japanese and North American medical and political accounts of female middle age to challenge Western assumptions about menopause. She uses ethnography, interviews, statistics, historical and popular culture materials, and medical publications to produce a richly detailed account of Japanese women's lives. The result offers irrefutable evidence that the experience and meanings--even the endocrinological changes--associated with female midlife are far from universal. Rather, Lock argues, they are the product of an ongoing dialectic between culture and local biologies. Japanese focus on middle-aged women as family members, and particularly as caretakers of elderly relatives. They attach relatively little importance to the end of menstruation, seeing it as a natural part of the aging process and not a diseaselike state heralding physical decline and emotional instability. Even the symptoms of midlife are different: Japanese women report few hot flashes, for example, but complain frequently of stiff shoulders. Articulate, passionate, and carefully documented, Lock's study systematically undoes the many preconceptions about aging women in two distinct cultural settings. Because it is rooted in the everyday lives of Japanese women, it also provides an excellent entree to Japanese society as a whole. Aging and menopause are subjects that have been closeted behind our myths, fears, and misconceptions. Margaret Lock's cross-cultural perspective gives us a critical new lens through which to examine our assumptions"--Publisher description Frontmatter List of Illustrations (page ix) Acknowledgments (page xi) Prologue: Scientific Discourse and Aging Women (page xiv) PART I JAPAN: MATURITY AND KŌNENKI (page 1) 1 The The Turn of Life—Unstable Meanings (page 3) 2 Probabilities and Kōnenki (page 31) 3 Resignation, Resistance, Satisfaction—Narratives of Maturity (page 46) 4 The Pathology of Modernity (page 78) 5 Faltering Discipline and the Ailing Family (page 107) 6 Illusion of Indolence—Ideology and Partial Truths (page 135) 7 Odd Women Out (page 171) 8 Controlled Selves and Tempered Bodies (page 202) 9 Peering Behind the Platitudes—Rituals of Resistance (page 233) 10 The Doctoring of Kōnenki (page 256) "Invisible Messengers" (page 299) PART II FROM DODGING TIME TO DEFICIENCY DISEASE (page 301) 11 The Making of Menopause (page 303) 12 Against Nature—Menopause as Herald of Decay (page 330) "An Act of Freedom" (page 368) Epilogue: The Politics of Aging—Flashes of Immortality (page 370) Notes (page 389) Bibliography (page 401) Index (page 429) In Osaka in 1984 the organizer of a public lecture about menopause started out the session by asking the entirely female audience, "What do you think of when you hear the word konenki?"