13/02/2026
Women reach a certain point in life and notice that something familiar has begun to loosen its grip. It might show up as relief rather than loss. The monthly vigilance fades. The quiet calculations about time and chances stop running in the background. The body changes, but so does the inner climate. Germaine Greer is naming this moment and asking why it has been treated as a problem instead of a turning point.
Menopause marks the end of a set of demands that have shaped women’s lives for decades. Fertility has carried social weight far beyond biology. It’s meant readiness, usefulness, and promise. When that ends, a woman is often treated as if something essential has gone missing. Greer argues the opposite. She’s pointing to how much energy has gone into maintaining the idea that a woman should remain pleasing, fertile, and young, and how freeing it can be when those expectations lose their authority.
The real problem she’s addressing is the pressure many women live under before menopause arrives. For example, the need to be agreeable, the habit of softening opinions and the sense that visibility depends on desirability. These pressures don’t vanish on their own. They’re enforced through praise, disapproval, and fear of becoming irrelevant. Greer is saying that menopause can interrupt this pattern because the system that rewards compliance begins to fall apart.
Psychologically, this shift can feel unsettling. Many women have spent years organising their sense of self around being wanted or needed in very specific ways. When those signals change, there’s a period of disorientation. Greer doesn’t deny that. What she insists on is the possibility that follows. Without the constant pull of approval, a woman may find herself thinking more plainly. Anger and honesty become easier to access. The internal editor that once softened everything can finally take a step back.
This idea runs against a deep fear of ageing. In Western societies especially, youth has been sold as proof of worth, particularly for women. Older women are often rendered invisible or reduced to caricature. Greer refuses that erasure. By calling the menopausal woman a revolutionary, she places her in active relation to power. A revolutionary isn’t simply someone who changes. She’s someone who no longer consents to the old rules.
The book this line comes from, The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause, was published in 1991, when menopause was still discussed mainly in medical terms or whispered about as a personal failing. Greer had already made her name with The Female Eu**ch in 1970, a work that challenged sexual repression and domestic confinement. By the time she wrote The Change, she was older, more combative, and less interested in reassurance. Her writing had always drawn from lived experience, classical literature, and a refusal to flatter her audience.
Greer has never been an easy figure. Her public career has included sharp arguments, feuds, and later views on gender that have caused significant controversy. Those positions have rightly been challenged and criticised. Yet this particular claim about menopause sits apart from those debates. It grows out of her lifelong attention to how women are trained to diminish themselves and how ageing can disrupt that training.
Literarily, the force of the idea comes from its refusal to sentimentalise. Greer suggests something tougher. A woman who no longer needs to please can be difficult. She may speak out of turn and care less about being liked. That difficulty is part of the point. Social order often depends on women absorbing discomfort quietly. When that stops happening, things do change.
There’s also a truth here about time. Youth carries illusions because it has to. It survives on hope, projection, and the belief that there’s plenty of room to adjust later. Age strips some of that away. What remains can feel stark, but also solid. Decisions sit differently when there’s less appetite for delay. Greer treats this clarity as a resource rather than a deficit.
Menopause is now discussed more openly, yet it’s often framed as something to manage discreetly, to treat, to get through with minimal disruption. Greer’s claim asks a harder question. What if disruption is part of its value? What if a woman’s refusal to continue performing youth is not a personal failure but a social challenge?
The strength in this view lies in its respect for women’s inner lives. It trusts that women know when a chapter has ended and allows space for anger, relief, and a new kind of confidence that isn’t borrowed from anyone else. Greer is offering recognition. For some women, that’s enough to begin again on different terms.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
Image: Helen Morgan
