About

About this project:

This individual research project of Alison Downham Moore was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant (2019-2023), focussing on the historically specific ways in which sexual and reproductive ageing is understood in our own time, via the retrieval of past medical concepts that have shaped our current modes of thought.

It aimed to show how our current understandings of sexual and gendered ageing came into existence throughout a process of scientific discovery and conceptual sorting that took place in 3 stages: 1) in French, German and British medicine from 1700-1870, 2) in several European cultures (especially French, British, American and Spanish) between 1870-1950, and 3) proliferating globally from the end of the twentieth century to the present. The term ‘sexual ageing’ is used here to refer to a range of ideas that existed concurrently from the early nineteenth century onwards, including menopause, andropause, the ‘critical age’, l’âge de retour (‘the turning age’) or the ‘climacteric’ – all terms which described either loss of reproductive capacity, loss of sexual desire, genital atrophy, age-related impotence or frigidity, or the loss of general health deemed resultant from changes in sexual physiology.

The project aimed to produce the first history of medical ideas about ‘sexual ageing’ and is innovative in framing the question according to this broad set of parameters that more accurately reflects how ideas about it were conceived throughout the historical period in question.

The project is primarily (though not exclusively) focused on France because it was there, in the nineteenth century, that some of our most important concepts of sexual ageing were substantially elaborated. The term ‘menopause’ was a French invention and throughout the nineteenth century, medical research on sexual ageing was heavily dominated by France, only disseminating gradually to other parts of Western Europe and to the US over the second half the nineteenth century, and only becoming a major topic of international medical inquiry in the early twentieth century. After this, France remained a major contributor to medical ideas on sexual ageing until the Second Wold War, after which it was eclipsed by the burgeoning of sexsteroid- hormone research in the US and elsewhere.

One of the aims of the project has been to show how medical thought on sexual ageing changed, firstly because of the growth of French medicine after the French Revolution until the 1890s, then across Europe and the US following the discovery of sex steroid hormones from the 1890s-1940s, and then again as a result of the new emphasis on hormone replacement therapies (HRT) in post-war international clinical practice, focused both on ageing populations and on transgender people.

Outcomes of the project include:

1. A large monograph by Alison Downham Moore, which is now in press with Oxford University Press. Details here: https://sexualageinginthehistoryofmedicine.org/home/the-french-invention-of-menopause-and-the-medicalisation-of-womens-ageing-a-history/ and pre-purchase HERE: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-french-invention-of-menopause-and-the-medicalisation-of-womens-ageing-9780192842916?resultsPerPage=100&pubdatemonthfrom=1&sortField=8&lang=en&cc=
2. A shorter monograph by Alison Downham Moore, which is now contracted with Cambridge University Press: The Gendering of Ageing in the Emergence of Biomedicine.
3. Methodological journal articles by Alison Downham Moore. See: https://brill.com/view/journals/jph/15/1/article-p5_2.xml and https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-229X.13015
4. A pedagogic journal publication working with a postgraduate candidate and mentee. See: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-global-history/article/aphrodisiacs-in-the-global-history-of-medical-thought/83534F01F85157DB0C74F74986522BF9
5. This website!
6. A journal special edition of the Journal of Aging Studies edited by Alison Downham Moore and Sarah Lamb on ‘Gender and Sexual Aging in the History and Culture Medicine’:
   https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-aging-studies/special-issue/10WJ49X2CJD
7. Several short media articles which have helped to disseminate the project publicly: ‘Menopause was a French Invention at a Time of Revolution’, Psyche Magazine (Aeon Media Group Ltd),  July 30^th 2024: https://psyche.co/ideas/menopause-was-a-french-invention-at-a-time-of-revolution and ‘More Health Scare than Healthcare for Women’, 360info, May 10^th 2024. Doi: 10.54377/49fe-0cd9. https://360info.org/more-health-scare-than-healthcare-for-women/ and ‘A Long History of Aphrodisiacs, from Health Tonic to Sexual Aid,’ Psyche Magazine (Aeon Media Group Ltd), 19^th May 2021: https://psyche.co/ideas/a-long-history-of-aphrodisiacs-from-health-tonic-to-sexual-aid