Life Begins at Fifty : THE CHANGE: Women, Aging, and the Menopause, <i> By Germaine Greer (Alfred A. Knopf: $24; 409 pp.)</i>

The Change,” an excruciatingly correct take on menopause, could not have been written by an American. European culture is like calcium, strengthening and keeping women upright as they age. Those women are different from us; they stand on the earth as if it were theirs. Sensuality, the real stuff, is everywhere. The fiercely oppressive, mean-spirited ageism in this country, and the vulgar commercialism of the medical community toward women’s health, have corrupted middle age, when the best part of life begins. Flesh defines the sexual woman in the U.S.A. The glass ceiling is but tissue paper compared with the prejudice against growing old.

Germaine Greer--so rich a personality you yearn for her as a dinner partner--offers women life after the change in witty, warm, gliding prose. The climacteric, renamed “menopause,” is a time Greer would not have missed for the world. Words to pleasure my heart; sweet words to refute menopause as metaphor for illness, a nasty side effect of the information age. Not illness, Greer commands, but time to take stock; the pause, during middle age, that is an opportunity to confront--and face down--our feelings about aging. The author recommends that we grow old as slowly as possible, but keeping the pace down takes considerable effort. In middle age, the no-free lunch costs even more.

“The Change” puts a new skew on an old oppression. Raw pride in a woman is never more needed than during menopause, when old masteries are lessening and new ones are not yet born. Greer gives women an English garden of ways to go, now that women are free to go their own way. Greer writes of the menopausal woman, “She is climbing her own mountain, in search of her own horizon, after years of being absorbed in the struggles of others.”

In this sense, Greer is of another time, speaking to women who are dependent upon men, and not to women who are living the legacy of the women’s movement, who are interdependent in dual-income households. Then, quickly, she turns and embraces all of us: “The Change” could be the road map in and around and out of medicalizing menopause. Greer’s blast against doctors who profit by destructive procedures procedures should be placed at bedside next to the Gideons; her support of proud femininity in older women, of their duty to be odd, to be calm, to feel tenderness, is an intimate voice to all women.

Greer has little use for cosmetic surgery, but then she is not in the American work force, where men, as well as women, will do anything not to be fired. Her preference for the natural is laudable and personal and not one whit important. It’s a pity that women spend long hours--best used in the search for serenity--pondering gray hair versus not. Greer’s face and hair are now free of everything except her lifelong lioness beauty, which makes her argument for all of us to age naturally less convincing. Yet her position is worth considering, since the art of non-aging through cosmetology is rarely practiced well. Few women understand that less is more on an aging face.

“The Change” is a scholarly study of menopause and aging, best described as defiant, the quite proper stance for squaring off against the onslaught of years. For some, the task continues from the start of menopause to the end of life. Now there is help, especially for those generations of women who have not seen the light in themselves before menopause. Greer writes, and we listen: cutting through the pros and cons of estrogen replacement without the bias of a medical practitioner is not a journey for wishy-washy thinkers; recognizing real symptoms, and discarding self-inflicted ones, demands a degree of sophisticated insight; putting an aging sex life on--or off--track is courageous work. Since women are gifted in the climacteric with the joys, the bliss, the unlimited opportunities in sex without birth control, menopause will never be without charm.

The climacteric is a mystery; it is a serious passage, complicated by myths. Greer is on top of the whole megillah, conquering it: traffic cop for uncharted enlightenments; stateswoman in the personal politics of growing old. “The Change” should be required reading on Madison Avenue, where men promote products for aging women with models who have just gotten out of their cribs.

Greer, magically, turns the deep injustices of aging into choices: Since most men simply don’t “get” grown-up sexuality in women, why not, why not, contemplate manlessness? (Greer’s backlash is the valid one: She writes in the New Republic that the “idea of a particular ‘male backlash’ occurring at this time has no substance . . . . Male hostility to women is a constant.”) Greer calls women over 50 who lose interest in sex “lucky.” But women are not of one mind about anything, so Greer explores sexual options for those who still like turning on. Greer has much to say about men “who bathe and shave when they leave their wives’ beds, rather than before they get into them,” thus footnoting one reason why some women opt to avoid the whole scene. Of course, that’s Greer’s own choice, but I don’t believe she’ll stick to it. Once a sexpot, always a sexpot.

There is an implicit subtext in Greer’s book to think “up,” meaning everything from not whining about hot flashes to the monumental rearranging of which-comes-first in one’s lifestyle to accommodate the process of aging.

Despite its academic heft, “The Change” is a dear book; a humorous, courageous, original, deeply understanding friend. Greer judges no woman, but slams into the promiscuous worship of estrogen replacement and the comparisons between middle-aged women and middle-aged men. Not that she tries to deny the advantages of being an older man; she actually walks us through the sticky wickets of being an older woman.

Greer assumes that readers will go along with her, and we must try, tugging away at ourselves for as long as it takes to find poise and peace in our menopausal years. Her ecstasy upon reaching freedom from self-consciousness while aging is both thrilling and, perhaps, suspect--less suspect at 50 than if she were 80 and mixing some of her upswings with the inevitable downs from the loss of physical strength. Yes, there is happiness at all ages, but there is sadness as well, healthfully so. The duality we feel in later years keeps us alive, youthful, inventive.

As inspiration, Greer has no peer. I would, if I could, follow the lady anywhere; but I am too old to grow old naturally, too saturated with images of youth, too brain-washed into thinking that age is unattractive. This ageless giant has given younger women, and wiser women than I, the New Testament of aging.