Pauline Bart. "Depression in middle-aged women." In Women in a sexist society. (Eds) Vivian Gornick and Barbara Moran. New York: Basic Books, 1971.

Diane Scully and Pauline Bart. A funny thing happened on the way to the orifice: Women in gynecology textbooks. American Journal of Sociology. 1973; 78: 1045.

Rosetta Reitz. Menopause: A positive approach. Pennsylvania: Chilton Book Company. 1977.

Barbara Ehrenreich and D English. For her own good: 150 years of experts' advice to women. London: Pluto Press. 1979

Lois Verbrugge and R Steiner. Physician treatment of men and women patients: Sex bias or appropriate care? Medical Care 1981; 19: 609-32.

FB McCrea. The politics of menopause: the discovery of a deficiency disease. Social Problems 1983; 31: 111-23.

S Bell. Changing ideas: The medicalization of menopause. Social Science and Medicine. 1987; 24: 535-42.

Nancy Worcester and Marianne Whatley. The selling of HRT: Playing on the fear factor. Feminist Review. 1992; 41: 1-26.

Margaret Lock. The politics of midlife and menopause: ideologies for the second sex in North America and Japan In: Lindenbaum S, Lock M (eds) Knowledge, power, and practice: the anthropology of medicine and everyday life. Berkeley, CA. University of California Press, 1993; 330-63.

K MacPherson. False promises of hormone replacement therapy and current dilemmas. In Callahan JC (ed) Menopause: a midlife passage. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press 1993; 145-59.

Jerilynn C. Prior One voice on menopause. J Am Med Women's Assoc. Jan/Feb 1994.

Sandra Coney. The menopause industry: How the medical establishment exploits women. First published by Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 1991. In 1993, it was published in Australia by Spinifex Press Pty Ltd. The first U.S. edition (revised) was published by Hunter Press Inc. 1994. The forward is written by Barbara Seaman, best known for her book, Women and the crisis in sex hormones first published in 1977. Seaman relates the difficulty that Coney had in getting this book published by a U.S. press.

ERT: The production of medical knowledge In Women, Health and Healing Levin. (will fill in the author & date later)

Renate Klein and Lynette Dumble. Disempowering midlife women: The science and politics of hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Women's Studies International forum 1994; 17: 327-43.

Terri Apter. Secret paths: Women in the new midlife. WW Norton & Co. New York, 1995. Highly recommended! In her extensive study of midlife women, Terri feels that the changes that occur during the midlife of women, becoming more energetic, assertive and self-confident, is not due to the biological changes at menopause but rather to psychological development.

For two articles debating the risk vs benefits of hormones:
Controversies in Science: Janet L. Stanford. The benefits of hormone replacement therapy outweigh the breast-cancer risks for some women. And, Graham A. Colditz, The benefits of hormone replacement therapy do not outweigh the increased risk of breast cancer. Both in The Journal of NIH Research, April 1996

Susan Love. Dr. Susan Love's hormone book: Making informed choices about menopause. New York: Random House 1997.

Paula Brown Doress and Diana Lakin Siegal. Ourselves growing older: Women aging with knowledge and power. Simon and Schuster. 1997.

Nina Shandler. Estrogen: The natural way. Villard, New York. 1997. This book has great recipes for soy and flax seed. One complaint though, I think her statement "After the age of 55, women are ten times more likely to have a heart attack than before menopause." (page xxvii) is very misleading. For more on this, check "Heart disease mortality data and a critique, USA" in the heart disease section.

In 18-19 June 1997, an International Symposium "The Menopausal Transition: a different view" was held at Leiden, The Netherlands, . The proceedings of this conference have been published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynaecology 1997; 18, Issue 2. The symposium was organized because of the concerns about the medicalization of menopause and about the underestimation of the consequences of long-term hormone treatment.  Although many of the participants at this symposium are physicians, all are very critical of the medical perspective.

Eylard V. van Hall, professor of gynaecology at Leiden University Medical Centre in The Netherlands and editor of this issue writes in his editorial: "The use of the terms menopausal and postmenopausal in this respect wrongly singles out women as potentially ill (mentally and physically) by the mere fact that they reach menopause and has therefore to be considered as an inappropriate, sexist and agist medical misnomer."

Other articles in this issue:

Ingar Palmlund contributed two articles: "The social construction of menopause as risk" and "The marketing of estrogens for menopausal and postmenopausal women". She argues that the USA may be a "home base" for some of the current promotion of menopause as risk. She cites many examples from the popular culture in the USA that seem intended to create a "collective consciousness" that women over 40 need medical and pharmaceutical treatment.

"The menopause and the pharmaceutical industry" by MN Dukes. In this article, the techniques used to develop a large market in estrogen for the long-term treatment of postmenopausal women are discussed. They include the selective emphasis to physicians of those research findings which point to the value of hormones, the development of direct approaches to the public to stimulate interest, and the creation of intermediary institutes to undertake selective research and influence opinion.

You can read the abstracts to these articles on PUBMED (for free). If you want to read an entire article but can't find this journal at a medical library near you, it can be ordered right on the PUBMED site (for a fee). Many of the above books can be found at your local library or at a university library. If you are working to reclaim menopause, share the articles, the books, and your knowledge with others.