When you listen closely to the language of women across generations, you begin to hear a kind of quiet poetry. Long before medicine named and measured it, women spoke of The Change. Not as a diagnosis, not as a defect, but as a passage. A threshold and a new season that arrived in its own time and asked to be met with patience, humour, and deep knowing.
The phrase “the change’ emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when menopause was neither openly discussed nor clinically understood as it is today. In many Western cultures, it became a respectful coy term, partly shaped by modesty, yes, but also by reverence. It acknowledged that something fundamental was shifting without reducing it to symptoms alone. Hormones were not the centre of the story; the woman was.
What was understood intuitively, and often spoken about in kitchens, gardens, and women’s circles, was that this was not an ending. It was a reorientation; a woman was changing her relationship to time, energy, creativity, and authority. Monthly cycles softened or ceased, and with that came a subtle but profound redistribution of life force. The body was no longer organised around reproduction, but around wisdom, discernment, truth-telling and storytelling.
Anthropologists and historians have since noted that in many traditional societies, women who moved beyond their bleeding years were granted increased social and spiritual authority. They became advisers, storytellers, healers, and guardians of memory. Freed from fertility, they were seen as holding a broader view and less tethered to the immediate demands of survival, more attuned to the long arc of life. In this context, the change was not something to endure, but something to grow into.
The modern medical term menopause, from the Greek men (month) and pausis (pause), is precise but narrow. It names the cessation of menstruation, not the expansion of consciousness that often accompanies it. It only speaks to what stops, rather than what begins. And perhaps this is why so many women today feel a quiet inappropriateness. Their lived experience is far richer, more complex, and more transformative than the language often allows.
In my opinion, the return to the change is not to reject science or progress, but actually to widen the lens. To recognise that this phase is as much psychological, emotional, and spiritual as it is biological. It is a recalibration of identity, a new type of shedding, of those roles that no longer fit. A deep invitation to inhabit the self more fully, more honestly, with more sovereignly.
My mother, my nana, and my great-grandmother were not being vague when they used those words “The Change” They were being specific in a different way and were naming a truth that lives beyond charts and timelines. A truth that understands a woman’s life as cyclical, full of physical and spiritual initiations, and meaning at every stage.
Perhaps the quiet wisdom of the change is something we are ready to reclaim now, not as nostalgia, but as remembrance.
The Collective Archetype of “The Change“
And for me, with my strong sense of the archetypal world, it feels perfect to give homage to all stages of womanhood, from the cradle to the tomb, we are WOMAN…
We start as a Child at the breast, to a Maiden in bloom. We change again as the Sacred Mother and caretaker, and experience a rush of our magical, re-productive energy as the Enchantress. And then the Wise Woman, the Alchemist and the Queen fuse and become one as our “Change” finds a new beginning.
Again, a reminder that this passage of The Change is not a problem to be fixed, but a turning of the inner archetypal forces. And like all true archetypal changes, they carry within them the promise of becoming more fully who we already are.
Heart to Heart, Elizabeth
Elizabeth Ellames 