Essays on physiognomy : designed to promote the knowledge and the love of mankind. Johann Caspar Lavater. London: Printed for Thomas Tegg, 1840, pg. 181.
I expanded my social media content over the summer to help share some of the history I had learned researching Masquerade Balls in Regency Britain, and have been having fun with more editorial content than I usually post (so you should join me on Instagram or Tiktok if that style content is of interest) and made an impassioned plea to revisit Mrs. Bennett as a more sympathetic character. In another post, I had talked about the “menopausal mouthpieces” of Jane Austen who I think speak the truth, albeit in sometimes silly or awful ways.
The response was welcome, with many ladies chiming in that they, too, believe Mrs. Bennett was probably in perimenopause, if not menopause, which accounts for her nerves, flutters, and lack of sleep.
So I wondered, what is the history of menopause?
Was I surprised to learn it was named in the Regency era? Nope! I was also not shocked at the history, but I do think it possibly creates even more sympathy for the middle-age “villains” of Austen.
Dr Charles Pierre Louis De Gardanne named the natural biological process, and wrote the first article on the subject | FIELDING HUDSON GARRISON
The term menopause was coined in the 1821 by French physician Charles-Pierre-Louis de Gardanne. Gardanne wasn’t the first to understand “the change” or even treat it, but he definitely was the first to pathologize it in the modern sense (The Unfolding Story: A Comprehensive History of Menopause for Women – Menopause Mastery). There is some suggestion that French doctors were consumed from the mid 18th century onward about why women were often more ill than men, seemingly aging faster and more poorly. In fact, a flurry of work between 1813 and 1865 focused on menopause, trying to understand the cessation of menstruation and its impacts on women (Menopause was a French invention at a time of revolution | Psyche Ideas).
Without a clear understanding on the systemic and hormonal changes that brought about menopause, it was naturally combined with broader diagnoses like hysteria that made women’s health issues psychological rather than physiological (Menopause: what’s changed? – The Lancet Obstetrics, Gynaecology, & Women’s Health).
It’s no doubt this framing that made it easy to dismiss the symptoms, including increased anxiety, hot flashes, night sweats, palpitations, mood swings, brain fog, and more, as something going haywire in women’s brains. And like hysteria, laying the cause somehow on the woman rather than her biology.
This would lay groundwork for another hundred plus years of institutionalizing women, particularly middle-aged women, for psychiatric complaints that are now better understood as in the body rather than the brain.
The treatment in the Regency, with the work of French physicians largely unknown, would have been practical. Traditional or folk remedies like herbs, diet, and dressing for comfort. Or employing things like fans and ice. How lucky women in the Regency had to contend with less garments, particuarly the heavy panniers or bustles.
There is also some suggestion that physicians would prescribe opium or cannabis to help treat symptoms. This may recast our understanding of Lady Bertram, who would rather hide at home at focused on her pugs more than her children and is painted in 1999 Mansfield Park as addicted to laudanum.
Certainly, Mrs. Bennett, Mrs. Dashwood, Lady Catherine, and a myriad of other middle aged characters in Jane Austen novels (Jane Austen who would have been close, if not going through perimenopause at the time of many of her works being published) are perfect embodiments of the era’s misunderstanding of menopause, which has helped shape the modern, western image of women as hysterical, emotional creatures who turn into witches or goblins at middle age, and can be only figures of ridicule or pity.
In Masquerades Balls in Regency Britain, I highlight the difference of gender masquerading between gentlemen and ladies. Gentlemen, when cross-dressing, invariably made their alter egos comedic. Older women were larger than life in their ridiculous, something that translated onto the stage with popular actors like Lady Pentzweasel who was played famous actor Samuel Foote who loved to perform in drag.
I think its smart of commenters to mark Mrs. Bennett for being in the thick of menopause, and I think it deserves another read of Jane Austen, trained on sympathy for the middle-aged characters who are suffering yes, from their foibles and follies and character flaws, but also from the sometimes debilitating effects of aging.
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