The Hypothetical Grandmother

Menopause may be a gift, but we are called on to account for it.

In most species, females breed until they drop. That is why you will never meet a menopausal dog, squirrel, capybara, or chipmunk. Menopause is a phenomenon unique to human women and some toothed whales—orcas, belugas, and my personal favorites, the narwhals. When I was a girl, the adult women around me called menopause “change of life,” a term that felt as deliciously mysterious as the promise of my first period, growing breasts, and going off to college. We may not know why humans experience menopause, but I haven’t met a woman who didn’t welcome it. I’ve never known a woman who wanted to mess with tampons, contraception, and childbirth at sixty, seventy, or eighty. Would you?

Menopause may be a gift, and yet we are called on to account for it. Perhaps you’ve heard of The Grandmother Hypothesis, a popular theory first floated in 1957 by a male evolutionary biologist named George Williams¹ to explain the problem of why human women outlive their own fecundity.

The hypothesis is that menopause evolved so older females could provide childcare and food for their adult daughters, freeing the younger women to reproduce at the highest possible rate. In other words, after her own breeding window closes, the Hypothetical Grandmother transitions into the hunter-gatherer equivalent of a full-time au pair and Instacart driver. Her motivation, as seen through the lens of evolutionary biology, is to pass on her DNA: her child inherits roughly 50% of her genes, her grandchild about 25%, her great-grandchild about 12.25%, and so forth. Menopause can thus be viewed as a hall pass for older women to remain alive once they’re done raising their own brood. Cool construct, and not very Handmaid’s Tale at all, I guess.

For the hypothesis to work, we must start with an awkward assumption: a matrilineal society in which the Hypothetical Grandmother and her many daughters can remain together in the same group or clan.² Following this logic, the Hypothetical Grandmother would be performing household tasks for multiple female offspring simultaneously, as there would be a whole lot of daughters in that household if the Hypothetical Grandmother has been breeding continuously from menarche to menopause.

So, the Hypothetical Grandmother, or HG, as I affectionately think of her, is Queen Bee, calling the shots, imparting her well-earned bee wisdom to the whole hive, and managing everybody, including her own mate, her adult male offspring, and her daughters’ mates, all of whom are bro-ing it up offstage chasing wildebeests. Or, who knows, maybe the guys are really at the watering hole. As long as they’re not underfoot with this bevy of hypothetical runny-nose grandchildren. And, don’t forget there’s a good chance the HG Queen Bee’s own mother is still living. This Hypothetical Sandwich-generation situation creates yet another layer of work for our HG because the HGG Queen Mother insists on everything done just so.

Not to worry. If you have ever met an older woman, you know that the Hypothetical Grandmother is nothing if not capable. She can multi-task. She can do it all, rule the hive, make everybody’s lunch, clean up the dishes, and still have time for Pilates. As they say, if you need something done, ask a busy person.

You probably noticed the queen bee analogy has badly broken down. Instead of being served by her hive, our HG Queen is working her dry old bee-butt to the bone, day-in, day-out, taking care of everyone. Maybe she doesn’t have time for Pilates anymore. If our Hypothetical Grandmother lives on for three decades beyond menopause, well, that’s thirty years of indentured labor in the service of her ever-attenuating DNA. It makes you pine for the good old un-evolved tree-swinging days when we female hominins were fecund unto death.

Except, all this never happened. If you consider that menopause is a hard stop around age fifty, and that prior to the Industrial Revolution, humans rarely lived past thirty-five³, the idea that our species somehow “evolved” menopause for babysitting purposes seems anachronistic and logically inept. The average life expectancy for women born in 1926, the same year as our friend George Williams, was fifty-eight years. I would like to know more about his relationship with women. (We already know about his relationship with ferrets⁴.) Why do I get the sense that the Hypothesis was dreamed up in the first place because women need to justify those eight unreproductive canasta-playing years of existence?

Post-menopause is the only time in a woman’s life when she is liberated from the perils of pregnancy. Until midcentury, most women could not expect to live long enough to experience this freedom. From menarche forward, our lives are fraught with a shadow menace of death-by-pregnancy that is unfathomable to men. Pregnancy is, at best, a life-altering state; at worst, it is fatal. This was true for our hunter-gatherer forebears; it was true before and after the invention of forceps in 1735; it is still true today. Menopause ends that danger.

Contemporary culture is always criticized for being youth-focused, but our culture reveres and cherishes its older men⁵. It is the older women whose existence requires mind-contorting rationalization, even as we older women prove ourselves to be brilliantly capable heads of state (though not in the US), thought leaders, artists—and, well, I was going to say kleptocratic kriminals, but let me know if you can think of any. The Grandmother Hypothesis is an insult designed to keep us in the kitchen baking cookies. (Remember the shit Hilary got for her for her 1992 “baking cookies” remark and her punishment in the form of a subsequent bakeoff against Barbara Bush?)

In a New York Times opinion piece this week, a fortysomething writer brags that she is not going to use Botox anymore, she’s “going full crone in 2025.” Because of her youth, I will give this writer some latitude and blame her editors for the clickbait headline that I suspect was retroactively baked into the last paragraph. But since I am old enough to be this writer’s mom, I feel entitled to point out that the word “crone” means “an ugly old woman, malicious and sinister,” and comes to us from the Middle English insult, literally “dead flesh, carrion.”

Recent anthropological studies suggest that women were co-equal big game hunters and warriors in ancient hunter-gatherer communities⁶ and that grandmothers were warriors, governors, and “the best hunters in the village.⁷”

Millennia later, we are stripping younger women of their reproductive rights and pushing older women to the periphery with fairytales designed to make them see their value as contingent on invisible, servile labor.

So, then, how far have we really evolved?

1. A picture is worth a thousand words

2. That is, as opposed to a patrilineal society where HG’s daughter joins her mate’s clan. If DNA preservation is the driving force, as the theory goes, the HG’s daughter will not get much help from her offspring’s paternal grandmother, what with paternity always suspect. The hypothesis also presumes the HG’s disinterest in the children of her male offspring, because you never know whether a son’s offspring are truly carrying your DNA (prior to 23andMe, that is.)

3. Correction needed here: it was rightly pointed out to me by K. Mason Schecter that I’m conflating average life expectancy (under 35) with modal, and average life expectancy is of course distorted by infant deaths, which were a-plenty, along with maternal death. I can’t seem to find studies suggesting the modal age of death for ancient female hunter-gatherers, but will update. Meanwhile, for those interested, here’s great discussion.

4. See footnote #1.

5. A screenshot is worth a thousand words. ^^

6. Anderson A, Chilczuk S, Nelson K, Ruther R, Wall-Scheffler C (2023) “The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts.” PLoS ONE 18(6): e0287101

“A number of studies support the contention that modern gender constructs often do not reflect past ones [and] show that both women and men in ethnographic hunter-gatherer societies govern residence decisions. The discovery of a Viking woman warrior further highlights uncritical assumptions about past gender roles. Theoretical insights suggest that the ecological conditions experienced by early hunter-gatherer populations would have favored big-game hunting economies with broad participation from both females and males.”, from Randall Haas et al., “Female hunters of the early Americas.” Sci. Adv. 6, eabd0310 (2020)

7.