I recently finished reading mythologist and depth psychologist Christine Downing’s 1991 book Journey through Menopause: A Personal Rite of Passage. Reading Downing’s book helped engage my own reflections on similar themes—in this case rites of passage, depth psychology, and the mythic, to name a few— in dialogue with someone else thinking enough of the same. My initial reaction to Downing’s book was disheartenment. I realized that at 51—and perhaps a year or more into menopause—though it’s hard to say because it creeps up on you—my body is well into a process of transformation and a feminine rite of passage of which I know almost nothing.
It isn’t that I didn’t notice—hot flashes are more than a little crazy-making— but until I picked up Downing’s book, I hadn’t done much more than think, “Oh, so this is what it feels like,” and Google up hot-flash. (Damn. They can last for years?!!!) But, being unconscious of a core feminine aspect of myself isn’t new. Most of my life, it seemed best to ignore uncomfortable things I couldn’t change. Growing up in the Canadian north on the back of a horse, my parents helped me to dream big. Mom would say, “The world is your oyster! Try hard and you can do anything you want.” And, she was right, there was an unbelievable amount of privilege in my upbringing and opportunity in my future, but they didn’t add the unsaid part, maybe partly because they didn’t really know it. Being a girl is a problem.
I didn’t really like girls anyway. Always in groups gossiping, girls watched while boys did cool things. I knew to do those things I needed to keep up and constantly prove I belonged, but Mom never let me get too far ahead of myself either. Seeing me succeed she’d warn, “Don’t be too fast or too smart. You don’t want to make them look bad.” Feminist and author Carolyn Heilbrun (1979) identifies a girl’s capacity to be female without liking girls as a failure to recognize one’s outsider status. I might call it passing for one of the boys, but Heilbrun is clear about negative consequences that are much more difficult to learn. Women become isolated from each other because they stereotype other women without including themselves. Women couldn’t meaningfully support me nor I them because I didn’t feel myself to be one of them.
In 1991, 51-year-old Downing explored menopause as a journey and wrote a book about it while I started veterinary school in a class where 8/10 of us were women. Surrounded by women, I didn’t expect how alone I would become as my career matured. Social scientists Irvine and Vermilya (2010) discussed this irony in their insightful paper on gender and veterinary medicine. They pointed out that despite more than 30 years of large female majorities, veterinary medicine still glorified heroic masculine qualities like strength, stoicism, and decreased commitment to family responsibilities. At the same time, feminine ones like nurturing and mothering were used to justify female veterinarians being paid less and owning fewer practices (p. 56). While unsurprising in male dominated professions, the twist in veterinary medicine becomes female veterinarians doing to each other through the same technique that Heilbrun noticed in 1979: stereotyping other women while attributing personal success to masculine qualities like loving science, aggressively asking for higher pay, or emulating a father figure (Irvine & Vamilya, 2010).
It's so painful to see this in myself! I was surrounded by competent, dedicated, empathic, and admirable women, but as my veterinary years ground on—internship, mixed-animal practice, surgical residency, small animal clinical practice, partner—these women were colleagues but almost never friends.
The masculine affiliated characteristics I admired most at the beginning but later distrusted (perhaps even hated) were associated with the hero. Sometimes, although I wish it weren’t so, I suspect surgery attracted me because it seemed so difficult. I admired surgeons, so wanted to be one. Depth psychologist and medical humanities professor Alan Bleakley (2013) notes that within medicine, surgeons are particularly susceptible to overly identifying with the hero, but I practiced surgery for several years before knowing anything formal about the mythic hero. I was introduced to the hero’s journey when I joined a small organization dedicated to contemporary rites of passage. Very simply, comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell popularized the concept of a mythic hero who undertakes a journey involving the three phases of departure, initiation, and return. The hero or heroine goes on an adventure, overcomes an ordeal, and brings treasure or knowledge back to their community. (In contrast, a rite of passage marks a major life transition between one stage or role and another.) Although successful veterinary surgeons need courage and stamina, a hero—individual and competitive rather than collective and supportive—constantly searches for something to overcome and everything is framed through conflict: success versus failure. Depth psychologist and author James Hillman (1990) names this the hero and dragon problem: heroes need dragons! Heroes CREATE dragons. I loved surgery, and, by the end, hated it. In mythic language, I was a hero and surgery was my dragon.
Returning to Downing, throughout her book she conceives of menopause as a biologically mandated feminine rite of passage, but constantly wonders: is it also a hero’s journey? The book begins with her just having turned 51 and at the beginning of menopause. She and a male companion head west from California and circumnavigate the globe. She perceives her literal travel as both a here-and-now experience and a symbol of inner movement and change. Downing admits she is used to attacking life’s difficulties with everything she has, but rapidly recognizes menopause can’t be won. When traveling, she notices her inner surrender reflected in asking for help and accepting her limitations more often, taking a slower less goal orientated pace, and paying attention to small things. Ultimately, she the most important lessons menopause teaches her are overcoming the all-consuming, desire-driven, questing of the first half of life and reconciling with her inner hero (p. 96).
I have read many of Downing’s other books, but none have struck me like this one. The time is ripe! How surprising that menopause and a book written 30 years ago have been fruitful!
Ultimately, Downing decides menopause is not a hero’s journey, at least not a traditional masculine one. As a feminine journey it has its own rhythms and lessons, and Downing’s 51-year-old writing self has initiated me into my own conscious engagement with menopause as a rite of passage. In connecting me to all women of history who survived long enough to live it, she puts salve on the alienation I felt so long as a veterinary surgeon.
References:
Bleakley, A. (2013). Gender matters in medical education. Medical Education 47: 59–70
Downing, C. (1991). Journey through menopause: A personal rite of passage. The Crossroads Publishing Company.
Heilbrun, C. H. (1979). Reinventing womanhood. W. W. Norton & Company.
Hillman, J. (1990). The great mother, her son, her hero, and the puer. In P. Berry (Ed.), Fathers and mothers (pp.166-209). Dallas, TX: Spring Publications.
Irvine, L., & Vermilya, J. R. (2010). Gender work in a feminized profession: The case of veterinary medicine. Gender and Society, 24(1), 56–82.
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