Female Midlife Research Articles

Taking Stock: Relational Happiness and Female Midlife in Doris Knecht’s Eine vollständige Liste aller Dinge, die ich vergessen hatte and Judith Hermann’s Daheim

This contribution focuses on the search for wellbeing at a time of the profound crisis of the Anthropocene, which demands that we move away from concepts of personal happiness and begin to imagine a more sustainable, relational wellbeing that includes both human and non-human partners. It argues that in this context female midlife is a fascinating terrain, which highlights the tension between the idea of happiness as a product of individual choice and the indisputable fact of our dependence on others. This article takes two recent German-language novels and explores the contrasting ways in which they figure their protagonist’s search for happiness in midlife. Austrian writer Doris Knecht’s Eine vollständige Liste aller Dinge, die ich vergessen hatte (2023) centres on a female protagonist who has experienced personal challenges and seeks to find greater happiness in middle age. Although Knecht’s novel reveals happiness as a social construct, it ultimately remains entangled in the inward-looking logic of happiness and a good life as the product of individualist optimization. By contrast, German author Judith Hermann’s Daheim (2021) situates the protagonist’s search for happiness in midlife as part of a broader context of social and environmental crisis and tentatively suggests the potential for a relational wellbeing based in an awareness of the interdependence of humans and the natural world.

Menopause and Midlife Aging in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Findings from Ethnographic Research in China.

Based on longitudinal mixed methods ethnographic research conducted in China from the mid-1990s to 2018, this article argues that Chinese lay language use divides what Americans and Canadians refer to as "menopause" into two distinct though overlapping concepts of the narrow juejing or end of menstruation and the broader non-gender-specific gengnianqi or "transition between middle and old age." While comparison with research done by Lock in Japan shows that Japanese language uses a similar set of two overlapping yet distinct terms called heikei and könenki, there are important differences between Chinese and Japanese views and experiences of female midlife amidst the similarities. While views and experiences of juejing in China are very similar to notions of heikei in Japan, gengnianqi is quite different from könenki. Like in Japan, the end of menstruation tends to be welcomed by women in China. Also like in Japan, midlife women in China had a lower prevalence of hot flashes than that found in the US and Canada. Also similar to Japan, Chinese women rarely associate hot flashes with embarrassment. However, unlike in the Japanese sample, the Chinese women reported a higher rate of irritability than even the American and Canadian samples. Contrasting with könenki, which is primarly associated with bodily aches and self-restraint in Japan, gengnianqi is commonly viewed as a time of vulnerability to irritable outbursts which must be allowed, though managed carefully. Overall, I show how menopause and midlife aging as concepts and as lived experiences are subject to variation related to differences in language, cultural ideas and practices, local biologies, and culturally-mediated generational experiences of historical change.

Chronic inflammation and its consequences during female midlife

Chronic inflammation and its consequences during female midlife

Female Midlife Crisis: How women live after the psychic revolution of life's noon

Female Midlife Crisis: How women live after the psychic revolution of life's noon

Life satisfaction, loneliness and related factors during female midlife

BackgroundStudies assessing life satisfaction and feelings of loneliness in mid-aged women are scarce. ObjectiveTo assess loneliness, life satisfaction and related factors in mid-aged Spanish women. MethodThis was a cross sectional study in which 182 women aged 40 to 65 completed the menopause rating scale (MRS), the University of California at Los Angeles loneliness scale (UCLA-LS), the life satisfaction index A (LSI-A), and a general socio-demographic questionnaire containing personal/partner data. Internal consistency of each tool was also computed. ResultsMedian [interquartile range] age of the sample was 51 [9.0] years. A 55.5% were postmenopausal, 47.3% had increased body mass index (BMI) values, 57.7% were abdominally obese, 1.6% had hypertension and 86.3% had a stable partner. In addition, 4.9% used hormone therapy and 19.2% psychotropic drugs. Multiple linear regression analysis found that higher UCLA-LS scores (more loneliness) correlated with MRS psychological scores, partner alcohol abuse, living in urban areas, lower LSI-A scores (less life satisfaction) and not having a stable partner. Lower LSI-A scores (worse life satisfaction) correlated with severe female economical problems, BMI values and UCLA-LS and MRS psychological scores. ConclusionLoneliness and life satisfaction in this mid-aged female sample was influenced by personal and partner issues which seem to play a much more relevant role than biological aspects. More research is warranted in this regard.

Conflicting discourses, shifting ideologies: pharmaceutical, `alternative' and feminist emancipatory texts on the menopause

This article uses a close pragmatic analysis to examine three discourses of the menopause, each with identifiably different health and lifespan ideologies, each used to further its own set of economic and/or political agendas. We argue that these texts have potentially powerful influential effects on women's interpretations of their own `change of life'. Discourse 1 (the `pharmaceutical' discourse) is represented by pharmaceutical brochures, which construct the menopause as medical `pathology' caused by physiological decrement and generally advocate correcting or suppressing symptoms by `treatment' with hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Discourse 2 (the `alternative' therapy discourse) as represented in popular printed media texts, rejects both subjection to medical/pharmaceutical intervention, and many of the claims made for HRT, and recommends that women take personal and active `control' by using `natural' remedies and making lifestyle adjustments. Although in ideological conflict, both these discourses are arguably ageist in their reproduction of negative perceptions of menopause. Discourse 3 (the emancipatory feminist discourse) reconstructs the menopause as a positively significant rite of passage — a time of re-evaluation and new-found freedom. Like Discourse 2, feminist discourse rejects the medicalization of menopause and the claims Discourse 1 makes for HRT. But, in addition, Discourse 3 rejects the dominant medical view of the cultural meaning of menopause, with the end of menstruation entextualized as gain, rather than loss, and redefines female midlife as a time of new freedom, wisdom and personal insight.

An international perspective: factors that affect female midlife and older displaced workers' re‐employment earnings

Workers affected by structural unemployment are often referred to as displaced workers. This study compares factors that affect re‐employment earnings of male and female displaced workers. The study focuses on midlife and older workers and is derived from the US 1988 Current Population Survey: Displaced Worker Supplement. Findings indicate that women's re‐employment earnings are largely affected by their human capital investment education. Men, on the other hand, have numerous factors that increase re‐employment earnings. As the economies of the U.S. and the European communities adapt to changes in technology and global competition, worker displacements will continue to be an important issue.

Ideology, Female Midlife, and the Greying of Japan

Ideology, Female Midlife, and the Greying of Japan