The Big Menopause Aging Myth

If I hear one more person say, "Well, historically, women didn’t even live long enough to experience menopause," I might just scream.

As a menopause educator and coach, I hear this narrative constantly. It’s repeated by menopause doctors, promoted by menopause influencers, splashed across social media, and casually dropped in conversation.

The underlying message?

Menopause is a modern glitch. It’s a side effect of 20th-century medicine keeping us alive past our biological expiration date. Women weren’t designed to live this long into post-menopause.

I am here to tell you, biologically and historically, that this is an absolute myth.

Not only is it factually incorrect, but it’s also deeply disempowering. It teaches us to view our menopause and post-menopausal years as a design flaw, to experience them with fear, confusion, and a sense of failure—as if we are wandering through a biological wasteland that women were never meant to see.

I want to set the record straight and explore what is really going on here.

The Statistical Trap: The Danger of the "Average"

Where did this “women never lived past menopause” myth come from?

In my mind, it comes from a classic misunderstanding of historical data. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I would dare to say that the historical data has even been manipulated!

If you look at the Middle Ages or ancient Rome, the "average life expectancy at birth" was indeed somewhere between 20 and 35 years old. But that didn't mean a woman hit her 30th birthday, shriveled up and dropped dead of old age.

That number is a statistical illusion caused by devastatingly high infant and child mortality rates. Historically, about half of all children died before the age of five from infectious diseases, lack of sanitation and famine. When you average a bunch of zeros and fives with a bunch of 70s and 80s, your mathematical average plummets to 30.

But demographers who study "background mortality", meaning they look at what happened to people once they cleared the hurdles of childhood, see a completely different story.

Data from the Human Mortality Database 1  and the landmark Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure 2 shows that in 17th-century England, if a girl survived to age 15, her average life expectancy stretched well into her late 50s and 60s. Even stripping out the brutal toll of historical childbirth complications, women routinely lived deep into post-menopause.

The Evolutionary Proof: The "Grandmother Hypothesis"

In evolutionary biology, almost every animal reproduces until the day it dies. There are only a tiny handful of exceptions on the entire planet: humans, killer whales, narwhals, belugas, and short-finned pilot whales.

Why did humans evolve this way?

Anthropologist Kristen Hawkes famously researched this by studying the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania—a modern society living without running water or modern medicine. Her groundbreaking work on the "Grandmother Hypothesis" proved that post-menopausal women are an evolutionary baseline requirement for the survival of the human species 3.

In these societies, older women don’t become obsolete; they become the primary economic and social engine of the community. Free from the physical drain of pregnancy, toddlers and child-rearing, they forage for heavy roots and tubers, providing the vital calories that keep their grandchildren alive.

Additional multi-generational research published in Nature (Lahdenperä et al., 2004) 4 used historical church records from 18th-century Finland and Canada to prove that the presence of a post-menopausal grandmother drastically reduced grandchild mortality and allowed daughters to successfully raise more children.

The signs are that women didn’t evolve to live longer because modern medicine gave us the opportunity, but we evolved to survive past our childbearing years because our tribe and younger child-bearing generation needed our wisdom, our labor, our support and our leadership.

Why Was History "Silent" About It?

If women have always lived past menopause, why didn't anyone talk about it?

First of all, the word "menopause" didn't even exist until 1821, when French physician Charles de Gardanne coined it. Before that, women referred to it naturally and quietly, part of post-reproductive aging.

Second, for much of human history, it wasn't viewed as a medical disaster. In many pre-industrial and Indigenous societies, transitioning past childbearing years elevated a woman's status. She became the village healer or shaman, the midwife, the keeper of agricultural secrets, and the wise Clan Mother.

It wasn't until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the medical field became heavily institutionalized and male-dominated, that medicine began pathologizing the female body, female experiences and framing a natural transition as a "deficiency disease" that needed to be managed, cured, or feared.

The 20th-Century Shift

What has changed in our modern understanding isn't the existence of menopause—it’s the narrative we are attaching to it, our understanding of it, and women’s experiences of it.

What we see is that women have been living long enough to experience menopause for hundreds of years. The 21st century hasn't invented menopause! However, it has just given women an extra 15 to 20 years of life after it, finally forcing a historically male-dominated medical system to pay attention to a transition that has always been there.

One of the most pivotal menopause moments came in 1966, with Dr. Robert Wilson’s book Feminine Forever. Despite its empowering title, this book set the tone for our modern understanding of menopause.

His main thesis was that menopause was an estrogen-deficiency disease that should be treated with estrogen replacement therapy to prevent the otherwise inevitable "living decay." The problem was his language and framing of women and menopause as a medical condition which needs to be treated with long-term hormonal use, calling it a serious, painful, and often crippling disease.

With increased female life expectancies, modern women are spending one-third to one-half of their entire lives in post-menopause. The modern conversation is steering aggressively toward "medical menopause," treating this transition as if it's a completely synthetic, modern problem that never happened to women in the past.

We are seeing the extreme end of this medicalization right now. Prominent voices in the space, such as Dr. Kelly Casperson, have pushed to reframe menopause entirely by calling it "hypogonadism," which is defined as a medical condition where the body's sex glands produce little or no sex hormones.

By applying a pathological disease label to a universal female milestone that has been experienced throughout the centuries, the modern healthcare system completely strips away its status as a natural lifecycle stage. It changes the narrative from "Your body is entering its next evolved, powerful chapter" to "Your body has a chronic deficiency disease that requires medical intervention from age 50 until the day you die."

While hormone therapy and modern medical interventions are incredible resources that help many women manage symptoms, we must be fiercely vigilant about how we talk about our bodies. There is a massive difference between choosing medical support to smooth out a natural transition and being told that your natural body is fundamentally broken and requires medical intervention to function.

When we reduce menopause to a clinical disease, we erase the millions of women who walked this path before us without being labeled "defective". Or worse, re-enforcing a misogynistic narrative that was never female centric and was disconnected from women’s lived experiences.

Reframing post-menopause.

If you are navigating menopause or post-menopause right now and are feeling overwhelmed by the noise, I want you to take a breath.

Did you know that famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman died in 1913 aged 91 years old.

Or that Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, died in 1910 aged 90.

History is literally littered with women who died of old age, debunking the myth that it was a medical or statistical mistake.

I want you to know that in post-menopause, you are not broken, you are not suffering from a deficiency disease, and you are certainly not a modern anomaly. You are stepping into a life stage that has been biologically forged over thousands of years. Women have been doing this since forever—and your body knows exactly what to do, how to manage and how to show up as the best version of yourself.

Disclaimer: This blog post is inspired by the article "Life Expectancy And Menopause: Debunking The Myth" by Tania Elfersy 5 

Jacqueline Rose is a menopause educator and coach, Founder of the Menopause Informed Training Program for Practitioners and host of the "Things I want my Daughters to Know" Podcast.