by Angela Saini
According to Parish, bonobo society works the way it does because females form powerful bonds with each other, even if they aren’t related. “The males can be friendly. They have sex with each other. But it’s nothing like the intensity or the scope that we see in the females. They sit together, play chase and play wrestle, groom, share food, and have sex.” The males are usually physically larger, but by virtue of their tight bonds, bonobo females manage to take charge. Observing the bonobos in San Diego Zoo, she found that of the time females spent affiliating with other bonobos, two-thirds was with females. De Waal has even described female bonobos as a “gift to the feminist movement.”
Their observations, though, still have a few critics. Chimpanzee expert Craig Stanford argues that animals in captivity don’t behave exactly the same as those in the wild, because they’re artificially forced into proximity with each other. “I’ve never seen a wild bonobo, and I work on chimps, but those of us who do fieldwork with great apes have tended to be a little skeptical of the view of those folks who say chimps are from Mars and bonobos are from Venus,” he tells me. “All of the female bondedness, female empowerment and sexuality, and all that stuff happen in a much higher rate and in a much more prominent way in captivity then it does in the real world, in the wild.”
Parish disagrees. Although she has only studied bonobos in captivity, she insists, “There’s nothing we see in captivity that hasn’t also been documented in the wild. Sometimes the weights are different because they have more free time on their hands in a zoo. They don’t have to go get their own food. But the repertoire is the same.” Animal experts Sarah Hrdy and Patricia Gowaty tell me they agree that bonobos are today widely accepted as being an unusually female-dominant species.
The stakes are high.
Primate research is high profile because of the enormous implications it could have for how we understand human evolution. It’s tempting to want to categorize ourselves as being either like chimps or like bonobos, because the two species so neatly encapsulate the modern battle of the sexes. Judging humans by our patriarchal history, it’s easy to see why so many primatologists have compared us to chimpanzees. But is it possible that somewhere in our evolutionary history we were matriarchal like bonobos appear to be?
For primatologist Amy Parish, the existence of a primate species in which females tend to dominate is hugely important, if only because it opens the debate. “When we only had chimps in the model, it seemed like patriarchy was cemented in our evolutionary heritage for the last five to six million years, because we share so many traits in common with them. The kind of ‘man the hunter’ model, all of that was based on chimps. Now that we have an equally close living relative with a different pattern, it opens up the possibilities for imagining that it’s possible in our ancestry that females could bond in the absence of kinship, that matriarchies can exist.”
Bonobos aren’t the only primate species in which females cooperate. Hanuman langurs, as documented by Sarah Hrdy, for example, band together to fight off outside males intent on killing their infants. Some female primates are also known to use social relationships with males to defy control, according to Barbara Smuts. In one baboon group she studied in Kenya each female had a “friendship” with one or two males. “Friends traveled together, fed together, and slept together at night,” she explains. The male friend would protect her and her infants from other males, which meant that she faced less harassment. It’s an arrangement that prompted Harvard University primatologist Richard Wrangham to describe these males as “hired guns.”
The focus on dominance in primate behavior makes it easy to forget that there are also species out there in which the sexes coexist and cooperate relatively peacefully. Pair-bonded tamarins and titi monkeys, for instance, share child care between males and females. Titi monkeys don’t seem to have any kind of dominance hierarchy. In other monogamous species, such as gibbons and simiangs, male coercion of females is hardly seen.
A common mistake is to assume that males naturally dominate because they’re larger. And this makes intuitive sense. If any one sex can take control, isn’t it likely to be the one with the physical advantage? But this isn’t true. Gibbons of both sexes look similar, for example, but the males tend to be very slightly larger and don’t coerce females. Size is a product of many factors, including the need to physically outstrip opponents in the competition for mates. For females in particular, not all their energy can be driven into height or size because they also need it for reproduction and lactation. There’s not always a correlation between size and male dominance over females.
Indeed, Katherine Ralls, a zoologist and researcher at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, confirmed this all the way back in 1976: “Females are larger than males in more species of mammals than is generally supposed.” In her paper in the Quarterly Review of Biology she adds that, for a variety of species, size doesn’t seem to correlate reliably with which sex is dominant. The African water chevrotain, which is a type of deer, and many small antelopes, for example, have larger females who aren’t dominant. Meanwhile, the Chinese hamster, ring-tailed lemur, and pygmy marmoset all have smaller females that dominate the males. Bonobo females, too, are generally smaller than the males. “Their larger size is balanced by the fact that females cooperate against males, whereas males seldom cooperate against females,” notes Barbara Smuts.
The common thread that unites species in which females are particularly vulnerable to male violence is females being alone. An orangutan female, for instance, will travel alone with her dependent young almost all the time. Female chimpanzees, adds Barbara Smuts, spend three-quarters of their time alone, with no other adults present.
Human life is far more complex, of course. It can’t be generalized the way life in other species often can. But in this respect at least, we appear to parallel each other. In patriarchal societies, a woman will almost always leave her own family when she gets married and go live with her husband’s. Losing the support of her relatives makes her especially weak in the face of violence and repression. And this weakness is exacerbated when men form alliances with each other and control resources, such as food and property.
In the end, this is where the die seems to fall when it comes to male dominance over females. Female cooperation makes the difference. This doesn’t answer the question of whether male domination was always the biological norm for our species, the way it is for chimpanzees, but it does offer a perspective on the battle for equality today. For Amy Parish, the great apes are not just a window on our possible past but also an example of the different ways we could live in the future. Her work shows that male domination isn’t inevitable when females work together to establish their interests—the way that bonobos do.
“It’s certainly given me hope for the human feminist movement,” she tells me. “That here we can see females actually bonding with each other, maintaining those bonds, maintaining that loyalty. And then ultimately having the power in their groups. So I think they’re a great model for that. That yes, females can be in charge. They can control the resources. They don’t need to go through males to get them. They don’t have to be subjected to sexual violence or infanticide, all because they have the upper hand. And they do that by staying loyal to their female friends.”
CHAPTER 8
The Old Women Who Wouldn’t Die
Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.
—Gloria Steinem,
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, 1983
I am at the end of my research, and I’ve reached Bedlam.
I’m only visiting—I want to better understand the experiences through history of women going through menopause—but this place makes me uneasy nonetheless. Bethlem Royal Hospital is one of the oldest psychiatric institutions in the country. It has shifted sites around London three times since it was established in 1247. Along the way it acquired such a shocking reputation that its very name, shortened to Bedlam, became s
ynonymous with chaos and uproar. Things got so bad in the nineteenth century that the government carried out inquiries into patient abuse, which forced reforms of the hospital.
An article by one doctor in the British Medical Journal in 1912 states that one in twelve of the women being admitted to insane asylums and hospitals like these across the country at that time were postmenopausal. In private institutions, where the wealthier tended to go, they were one in ten. The hormonal and physical changes associated with menopause, as well as the shift it marked in their life and status as mothers, had impacts on the mental health of many older women. Some cases were documented with medical fascination. One doctor described a forty-nine-year-old woman who believes she’s decaying. She eventually commits suicide. Another, age fifty, complains that she’s no longer a human being, with no stomach, heart, or lungs. A forty-six-year-old wife, meanwhile, develops the habit of stripping naked and demanding sex.
This was a time when menopause was grossly misunderstood. Fairy tales painted women at the end of their childbearing years as useless, crazy old crones. They lived in shoes with too many children or killed innocents in gingerbread houses. Farther back in history, they had been treated as witches more literally. At the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in 1692, sixteen accused women were executed or died as a result of their incarceration, and from what we know, at least thirteen of them were menopausal.
With little understood about menopause and the mental pressures facing older women, people in the nineteenth century tried out all sorts of disastrous cures for its symptoms. One was bloodletting, to get rid of what was believed to be unspent menstrual blood. Sometimes they were given drugs like opium or morphine. In the worst cases, women had their ovaries surgically removed. Meanwhile those who ended up in asylums like Bedlam may have found themselves in the care of strict, fatherly male doctors, bizarrely advising them to drink less alcohol, take hot baths, and wear flannel underwear. One doctor at the time even suggested that menopausal women retreat to a quieter life and withdraw from the outside world, reflecting the attitude that they should be neither seen nor heard.
Life in the asylum wasn’t easy. A woman arriving at Bedlam between 1676 and 1815 would have been welcomed by two imposing stone statues flanking the entrance. They represented the two categories into which most mental patients were thought to fall. The first figure was Raving, desperately struggling against hospital chains, his face contorted with agony. The second, Melancholy, was unrestrained but disturbingly unengaged, as though the outside world had lost all meaning. Of the women admitted to Bethlem Hospital for menopause-associated mental illness, only up to half recovered, according to data in 1912.
Thankfully, the bad days of Bedlam are over. In its current incarnation on a picturesque country house estate in southeast London, Bethlem Hospital is a peaceful place. There’s a collection of small, low wards, each in a separate building, nestled in hundreds of acres of soft greenery. Raving and Melancholy now live in the reception of a small, sunlit museum inside the grounds, where they are brought to life upstairs in the histories of real people. On the wall I find two nineteenth-century photographs, both of older women. One is suffering from chronic mania, her face faintly twisted as she grips a lifelike doll dressed in long white robes. The other, the caption says, suffers from melancholia. She looks as though she’s reflecting on her life, with a pained, faraway look in her eyes.
If fertility represented youth and health, society assumed, then infertility was exactly the opposite. It wiped out the entire point of being female. It turned a woman into something else. And this was reflected in the ways older women were treated, especially by science and the medical profession.
“Estrogen-starved women.”
In 1966 a sensational new health book was published in the United States, promising women that they had nothing to fear from growing old, because science could make them young again. It became an instant hit, selling a hundred thousand copies in just seven months. Its title was as seductive as its contents: Feminine Forever.
According to the author, New York gynecologist Robert Wilson, the answer to women’s (and husbands’) prayers came in the shape of sex hormones. With a youth-restoring blend of hormones including estrogen, he claimed, a woman’s “breasts and genital organs will not shrivel. She will be much more pleasant to live with and will not become dull and unattractive.” They couldn’t reverse infertility, but hormones could at least swat away the hot flashes and mood swings that damaged some postmenopausal women’s lives.
It sounded too good to be true. It wasn’t—at least not entirely. Wilson wasn’t a total quack. With the dawn of endocrinology in the early twentieth century, scientists had finally got a grip on what was actually happening during menopause. The biological mechanism turned out to be quite simple. Every month or so, ball-shaped pockets called follicles grow inside a woman’s ovaries. They release the eggs that are needed to make babies and secrete estrogen and progesterone. Girls are usually born with somewhere between a million and two million follicles, although most of these are gone by the time they hit puberty. Over decades, all the follicles eventually disappear, and it’s their loss that spells the start of menopause. This means no more baby-making eggs and also a drop in hormone levels.
The loss of estrogen in particular is what prompts the symptoms we usually associate with menopause, such as hot flashes, a change in sex drive, mood swings, and weight gain. Hormonal changes before the start of menopause usually begin around age forty-five, with menopause itself starting on average between fifty and fifty-two. It has been estimated that around 5 percent of women experience menopause early, before they’re forty-five. By giving a menopausal woman extra hormones, as Robert Wilson advocated, some symptoms could be alleviated.
Indeed, hormone treatment had already been around for decades before his book was published. In the 1930s a small number of doctors and pharmaceutical companies had begun to reframe menopause as a disease of deficiency, like not having enough vitamins. In some parts of the world, it was no longer seen as a normal, natural part of aging. Within a few decades, it became almost routine for women to take estrogen pills or injections when they reached menopausal age.
According to Saffron Whitehead, emeritus professor of endocrinology at St George’s, University of London, treatments boomed in the 1950s and 1960s. After the Second World War, women who had worked as part of the war effort in Europe were instead encouraged to be housewives, and the idea was that hormone therapy “would keep women sexy and at home,” she explains. Ads for Estinyl hormone tablets from 1952, for instance, feature beautiful, smiling women, their faces floating serenely in a sea of flowers.
Robert Wilson chose to send his own message with a sledgehammer rather than with flowers. He argued that menopause should be recognized as a “serious, painful and often crippling disease,” turning its sufferers into what he disdainfully described as “castrates.” Anne Fausto-Sterling, professor of biology and gender studies at Brown University, who has written about his work, describes his disparaging depictions of “estrogen-starved women.” They are portrayed as existing rather than living, she says. Pictures that he includes in one of his published papers show elderly women walking along in public dressed in black and hunched over. “They pass unnoticed and, in turn, notice little,” he warns his readers.
By the 1960s the hormone treatment wagon had turned into a juggernaut. After Feminine Forever came out in the United States, British journalist Wendy Cooper saw similar success in the United Kingdom in 1975 with her book No Change: Biological Revolution for Women. “She said it was the best thing that had ever happened to her,” recalls Saffron Whitehead. “Everyone, because of this publicity and how young it kept you, would take it.”
Of course, no magic cure ever turns out to be as magic as it first appears. After Robert Wilson died, a scandal in 1981 revealed that his pockets had been lined all along by pharmaceutical companies who were trying to sell more hormone replacement drugs. His best-selling
book Feminine Forever had been bankrolled by Wyeth Ayerst, one of the therapy’s biggest manufacturers.
More worryingly for the many women who had been convinced of the transformative power of hormones, researchers discovered that there might be a dangerous link between estrogen replacement therapy and cancer of the lining of the womb. In the early 1990s large studies showed that hormone treatment mixing estrogen and progesterone increased breast cancer risks. And by 2002, another important study confirmed that estrogen and progesterone really weren’t the panaceas they seemed. Hormone replacement therapy, while changing the lives of many women for the better, also increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Prescriptions plummeted and women were advised to take the drugs only for serious menopausal symptoms. Hormone treatment remains a much-welcome boon to many women who take it, but doctors today tend to prescribe it for no longer than two to four years, says Saffron Whitehead. She herself took hormone therapy for fewer than three years. “We’re now on the fence about it,” she says, adding that scientists are still analyzing data to get a clearer grip on how safe it is.
The saga has a both a good and a bad ending. The medical drama surrounding hormone replacement therapy certainly caused uncertainty and panic, and risked lives. But it at least shone a much-needed light on the health of older women. Researchers have dedicated more time to picking apart what the symptoms of menopause really are and to better treating the other problems, including psychological illnesses, associated with old age. A few scientists are even working on solutions to help women of menopausal age get pregnant or delay the onset of infertility.