Let's hear it for menopause

This excerpt is from the Power of Aging an article about 80 year old activist Betty Krawczyk.

"Grandmothers have long played an important role in sustaining life and nurturing their families and the community at large, Betty says.
"The human female is the only animal to live so long after the reproductive organs shut down," she says, adding that according to anthropologists, the role of providing food for the clan often fell to older women when the traditional male 'hunter' could not find enough.
"Menopause allowed older women to give back to the community by allowing them to focus not on reproducing, but nurturing," Betty says. In fact, when looking at human evolution, menopause was the gift "nature gave to the human species that enabled our species to multiply and spread out over the globe."
It is this "ancient connection between old and young" and the tradition of elder leadership that Betty says more older people need to embrace. "Elders and grandmothers in particular are way too meek and mild," she says, adding that to harness the power born of experience, more older people need to insist on an important leadership role.

Betty Krawczyk is the author of Clallyoquot: The Sound of my Heart and Lock Me Up or Let Me Go.

Excerpt from an interview with Betty:

Elders and grandmothers in particular are way too meek and mild. We are a huge population and we should go straight for the sources of power, not to become co-managers of a monstrous unmanageable environmental and economic mess, but to strike out for new territory in refusing to accept the corporate culture as an ideal way to live.
Practically speaking, running for office, getting behind progressive moves that promises to make children a priority, that promises to actually bring forth measures to preserve the environment before every last tree is cut, every last fish caught, every bit of farm land developed, etc., grandmothers know what needs to be done if our life support systems are to be preserved and we should be busy about doing them.

Read the whole article at:
http://50plus.com/Lifestyle/BrowseAllArticles/index.cfm?t_offset=2&documentID=21635