"Average age at menopause today is 51; average life expectancy in 1900 had only reached 47. " This statement makes the common error of supposing that ‘average life expectancy’ is about when adults can expect to die, on average. In fact, ‘life expectancy’, unless stated otherwise, means life expectancy from birth. With a high infant mortlaity in 1900, the average life expectancy is dragged down. The better statistic could be 'life expectancy from age 25 (or whatever age you want to start from. Currently a 65-year old American man can, on average, expect another 18 years; a 65-year old woman, another 21 years. See: http://www.cleveland.com/datacentral/index.ssf/2014/10/us_life_expectancy_for_65-year.html
I came here to make the same point. It wasn’t like people hit 50 and dropped dead. Even in 1900, if you made it to your 30’s, chances were probably quite good you had a long way to go – you’ve made it past infant mortality, childhood diseases, and dying in a war.
ETA: Aha! Here are some relevant statistics:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Life expectancy increases with age as the individual survives the higher mortality rates associated with childhood. For instance, the table above listed the life expectancy at birth among 13th-century English nobles at 30. Having survived until the age of 21, a male member of the English aristocracy in this period could expect to live:[25]
1200–1300: to age 64
1300–1400: to age 45 (because of the bubonic plague)
1400–1500: to age 69
1500–1550: to age 71
I disagree with Cecil’s article. It makes a basic mistake about life expectancy. In the past, most deaths occurred in young children, dragging the average lifespan way down, but if you survived childhood, you had a pretty good chance of surviving into your 70s. However, childbirth was very dangerous and a significant proportion of the human female population died giving birth. If a woman made it menopause, she had a pretty good chance of living for decades afterwards.
The article makes another big mistake-it confuses gradually declining fertility with menopause. They are not the same thing at all. The only known species that go through a defined sudden stop of female fertility in mid-life are killer whales and humans. These intelligent, social, long-lived species are much more likely to be able to benefit from healthy grandmothers with memories of past times and the ability to help care for children than are most other species.
There’s a lot of new evidence supporting the grandmother hypothesis. For example,
I don’t know about heats in other mammals, but monthly periods take a lot out of you, and as you get older can be exhausting. I’m 49, and not even showing early signs of menopause, which I find a little depressing, because at my age, periods are exhausting, and I have no intention of having another child. I’m here to tell you that breastfeeding puts a great deal of stress on a woman’s body as well.
I have a feeling that probably late menstruation, and late childbearing, and raising of an infant, are probably really hard on a middle-aged woman’s body, and it’s possible that when there was no birth control, and no remedies for many of the problems that could result from having periods into late middle age, like iron and calcium supplements, and pain relief to allow for normal activity, there was probably and inverse relationship between age at menopause and age at death (exceptions for very early menopause due to health problems).
Anyway, obviously something like that won’t get passed down, but still, if you live longer with earlier menopause, you can have more total years lived after menopause in a group of 100 women, even if more of the women had later menopauses,
What gets me is that it feels like women are being told, “you had your child bearing years. You served your purpose. Now you are condemned to be old, fat, grumpy & useless. Move into the old, undesirable Mom role now. You are no longer attractive.” It’s as though (human) women were meant to be cast aside at menopause while most men grow “distinguished & interesting” with age. Nobody said it was fair, but it still sucks.
Yep. There’s a misconception that how long people live is a nice bell curve whose peak coincides with “life expectancy”. But really, it’s a lumpy distribution curve that (depending on the society in question) may have four or five peaks and “life expectancy” doesn’t coincide with ANY of them. Anyone who knows the difference between mean, median, and mode shouldn’t be surprised by this.
But what’s really relevant to the discussion is not “At what age do most females die?” but rather, “What percentage of females live past 51?” and “Of females who do reach age 51, what’s the median number of years they will live past 51?”
According to the Social Security Administration, in the year 1900, 57% of females lived past 51. Of this group, slightly more than half would still be alive at age 72.
It’s also worth noting that (according to the same tables) 22% of women in the year 1900 died before reaching the age of 16. So, putting this all together, we can say that out of 100 female babies, 78 of them would survive to the age of 16, and 57 of them would make it all the way to 51, and 29 of them would make it past 72. So, of the 78 women who actually make it past puberty and are ready to start making babies, nearly three-quarters of them will live all the way to menopause, and more than half of the ones who do make it to menopause will live at least another TWENTY-ONE YEARS past menopause. And this is in the year 1900.
The original article would have us believe that women rarely made it to menopause at all in 1900 and the few who made it didn’t live long afterwards. But the truth is that more than one third of all adult women went on to live a full two decades or more past menopause.
