Менопауза – последња мистерија крви
Menopause – The Last Mystery of Blood

Author(s): Miroslava Malešević
Subject(s): Gender Studies, Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology, Gerontology
Published by: Етнографски институт САНУ
Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with the women transition into the third age of life and with the role of the menopause in that process. The scope is on the ways the women face the aging in this culture, on the shifting of the others’ relations toward them, and on defining the new role for a women to be tаken after the period of fertility is once over. The cultural attitudes towards the menopause are of an extremely negative kind, although the menopause is primarly deifined in the terms of hormonal activity, as the definitive extinguishing of the ovaries function. ''Klimakteruša'' (woman in climax) is an ordinary term for the ill-balanced person who can't control the own behaviour; the fifty-year old woman suddenly becomes nonat tractive and useless “old witch”, just like there are no phases and nuances in between the maturity and the aging. Losing the functions of an erotic object and of the fertility looks to the most of the women like entering terrae incognita in the culture obsessed by youth and by the youthfully values. The paper is based on the answers the author collected from about thirty female friends and coevals from Belgrade and from a village near city of Šabac, concerning their experiences on this radical life turnover.

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