From Menarche to Menopause: Misconceptions About Women's Reproductive Lives

When psychologists and journalists write about women's reproductive lives, two habits of thinking tend to shape what they say. The first is a tendency to treat women as a problem: the negative sides of these experiences get the spotlight, while whatever might be positive stays in the shadows. The second is a preference for biology as the ready explanation, reaching for physical causes before considering social or personal ones. Together these two slants color most of what the public ends up believing.

Take menstruation. A common assumption holds that women think less clearly or perform worse on mental tasks while they are menstruating. The evidence does not support it. The same goes for the premenstrual phase, which popular belief paints as a time of wild mood swings. That picture is far more dramatic than what research actually finds.

Sexuality gets filtered through the biology lens as well. Studies have leaned toward measuring physical responses while paying less attention to the positive connections between partners, the interpersonal side of sex that matters a great deal to the people involved.

Abortion is surrounded by a particular myth. Most people assume a woman who ends a pregnancy is left with deep guilt or depression. What the research shows instead is that relief is the typical reaction, not anguish.

Pregnancy has drawn surprisingly little attention from psychologists, and the work that does exist tends to dwell on the difficult parts: the strains of pregnancy itself, of motherhood, of infertility. The fuller experience is largely missing from the literature.

Menopause is one reproductive event that psychology has studied more closely. Even so, the widespread notion that menopause itself brings on depression, anxiety, and related troubles is mistaken. The change of life does not cause those psychological problems the way people assume it does.

A couple of developments offer some reason for optimism. The rise of Positive Psychology shifts attention toward what goes well rather than only what goes wrong, and the growing body of multicultural research within the Psychology of Women broadens whose experiences get counted.