For 2 months, I’ll be in residence at Cité internationale des arts in Paris researching the figure of the Crone and female aging through creative practice, to broaden and deepen the ways we collectively understand and experience menopause.
Pre-Christian cultures venerated the older woman – the Crone – as a figure of wisdom and power, represented by the goddesses Kali, Baba Yaga, Vasalisa, Hecate, and others. As Judeo-Christianity rose, the sacred figures of Mother and Maiden were incorporated into the religion, but the Crone was deemed too threatening due to her power and connection to death, and hence came to symbolise chaos and irrationality. By the Middle Ages, the wise old woman had become an ugly, withered, evil, and loathesome witch. Female healers, midwives, widows and spinsters, and those whose behaviour simply did not conform to social norms were accused of witchcraft. Of 45,000 executions, 90% were women, and most of them over 40 years old.
While the Ancient Greeks paid much attention to puberty, menstruation, and childbirth, and blamed many female maladies on “vexed” wandering wombs, they did not mention the climacteric at all. In fact, the word menopause was only invented as recently as 1821, in post-revolutionary Paris – in the period of crisis, rupture, and the collapse of tradition. No other culture showed as much interest in the menopause as the French for the next half century.
How then, is the climacteric treated in France, and how do Crones see themselves in this city that brought menopause to the world’s attention? Paris, of course, is a melting pot, and as such will include women from cultures that revere old age, cultures that worship youth, cultures that see menopause as a hormone-deficient disease, as well as cultures that see this crucial final life stage as transformative and liberating.
