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Full-Text Articles in Women's Health
Passage Or Pathology: Current Attitudes Toward Women's Aging In The Literature Of Menopause, Kaaren Gearhart Ancarrow
Passage Or Pathology: Current Attitudes Toward Women's Aging In The Literature Of Menopause, Kaaren Gearhart Ancarrow
Institute for the Humanities Theses
Menopause is currently portrayed in the medical literature as a pathological 11 process resulting from "hormone deficiency." However, feminist writers contend that the climacteric is part of the normal female aging process and oppose the medicalization of menopause and the consequent inevitable hormone replacement therapy (HR T) promoted by the hegemonic medical and pharmaceutical industries. This paper explores the historical development of these two paradigms of menopause and their manifestations in samples of three classes of contemporary literature on the subject: gynecological textbooks, popular advice books written by physicians, and women's accounts. Five major themes are investigated using quantitative and …