Dear Matriarchs and matriarchs in the making,

I want to tell you something the mammal kingdom rarely tells anyone: almost no species goes through menopause. Nearly every mammal reproduces until the end of her life. There is no pause, no second chapter — just fertility, straight through to death.

Except for a small, strange handful. Humans. Orcas. Short-finned pilot whales. Belugas. Narwhals. That's the list. And every one of these species shares something else in common — they are female-led, deeply social, cooperative family structures, built around matriarchs who no longer bear young but never stop holding the pod. I don't think that's a coincidence. I think it's a design.

For a long time, the story we were told was that menopause meant shutting down — ovaries going quiet, a woman's biological usefulness expiring at the exact moment her reproductive years ended. But new research is undoing that story. Scientists studying mice found that after reproductive function declines, the ovaries stay active — they just change jobs. Immune cells like T cells and macrophages ramp up, and gene activity shifts toward immune and inflammatory regulation. A parallel, not-yet-peer-reviewed study in postmenopausal women found ovarian proteins still changing with age, long after fertility has ended. The body isn't closing a door. It's opening a different one. Menopause may end fertility. It does not end the ovaries' story.

I keep thinking of the scene Cat Bohannon tells in Eve — an old grandmother in Jericho, 8,500 years ago, reaching in to turn her granddaughter's breeched baby, saving them both. Bohannon's theory is simple and it lands hard: female bodies are far more likely to grow old, so they carry what the young cannot yet hold — memory, judgment, the knowledge of what has gone wrong before and how the village survived it. This is the grandmother hypothesis, and it is not a metaphor. It is a body doing its work.

So when I look at the orcas — matriarchs leading their pods decades past their last calf, immune systems and ovaries still quietly humming with purpose — I don't see biological leftovers. I see the same design showing up wherever cooperative, female-led community exists. The post-menopausal body isn't retired. It's reassigned. From producing life to protecting the ones already living it.

We are only beginning to understand what postmenopausal women's bodies are actually doing. But the shape of the evidence keeps pointing the same direction: toward purpose, toward protection, toward the matriarch as a biological and communal necessity — not an afterthought.

I'll tell you where I am in this, too. I am nearing the end of my own transition into menopause. I still remember the first intense symptoms, my attempts to stay open-minded to the change, and then the incredibly intense anger that came when I couldn't get properly diagnosed or cared for. It took years to build a plan to support myself through this transition. And it was a reminder — just as it was during my own menarche, and again through pregnancy and new motherhood — of how rough the edges of patriarchy can be when you are living inside a woman's body.

And yet that same desperate search for information brought me back into the sisterhood of women, where I have so often found the best knowledge — passed quietly between aware grandmothers and daughters, and among peers, in our own subterranean rite of passage.

May we keep learning from this science. And may we keep learning from the women who are living proof of it.

That subterranean rite of passage deserves to come up into the light. This winter, I will begin offering a ceremonial rite of passage for women moving through menopause. If that's something you'd like to help make happen — as a participant, a collaborator, or simply someone with wisdom to offer — reach out to me. I'd love to hear from you.

With care,

Maija

Sources: National Wildlife Federation, "Animals: Mammals with Human-like Menopause" (nwf.org); ScienceAlert, reporting on a study published in Molecular Human Reproduction; Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (Knopf, 2023).

🌿 Matriarch Makeover

Maija Danilova West is a governance practitioner, peacemaker, and the author of Matriarch Makeover: A 30-Day Invitation. Her forthcoming book, From the Triangle to the Circle: Matriarchal Governance Design, is addressed to practitioners of law, peacemaking, and governance who are earnestly seeking a way to practice that is more life-affirming.

Original content by Maija, copy edited by Claude.

Last updated: August 18, 2026