Menopause and Female Power: From Natural Selection to Patriarchal Contempt

Menopause is a rare phenomenon among mammals, found only in humans, orcas, and a few other social species. According to classical Darwinian logic, the persistence of post-reproductive individuals seems like an evolutionary mistake: why keep a body alive if it no longer transmits genes? Yet the existence of menopause shows the opposite. The grandmother hypothesis (Hawkes, 1998) and recent studies on cetaceans (Foster et al., 2012; Brent et al., 2015) demonstrate that post-reproductive females provide a crucial adaptive value, increasing the survival of descendants through ecological memory, leadership, and cultural transmission.

This article explores the biological, anthropological, and philosophical dimensions of this phenomenon. Zoological evidence is compared with the historical role of elder women in hunter-gatherer societies, where they acted as keepers of knowledge and ritual authority (Gimbutas, Mead). Later, it is shown how patriarchy has transformed this adaptive advantage into stigma, reducing women to their reproductive value and pathologizing menopause. Through feminist critique (De Beauvoir, Haraway, Federici), the article denounces patriarchal biologicism, which presents itself as natural but is in fact a cultural construction—unnatural and contrary to evolutionary evidence.

The final thesis is that menopause does not represent a biological failure but a strategy for collective survival. By contrast, the true biological anomaly is patriarchy, which has silenced and belittled one of the most singular traits of our species.