Kwaneta Harris is incarcerated in a Texas state prison. She is also the closest thing the women around her have to a menopause educator.
Harris draws anatomy by hand, passes the pages down the run, and holds peer circles where women put names to what is happening in their bodies. She writes for national outlets, keeps a Substack, and sits on the advisory board of the Menopause Project.
She started because nobody else was going to.
“It was like clicking a puzzle again,” she said of the moment she finally understood her own symptoms. “And it was so relieving because I really thought I was losing my mind.”
The group she is teaching is growing fast. Women over 50 made up 8 percent of the women in U.S. prisons in 2008. By 2023 they were 18 percent. Only five states have any written policy that so much as mentions menopause care.
The training gap is not only behind the walls. Of 99 OB-GYN residency programs that responded to one survey, just 31 percent had a menopause curriculum at all. Town halls on the subject drew more than 600 incarcerated women across two California facilities.
What stays with Harris is how the symptoms get received.
“They have an attitude such as, ‘This is part of your punishment,'” she said. “But this is not part of our punishment, to suffer.”
Alabama’s corrections manual reads differently on paper, stating that “preventative screening for osteoporosis, menstrual abnormalities … menopause shall be provided.” Policy in a binder and practice on the run are two different things.
What Harris built is not a program with a budget line. It is a chain of women telling each other the truth about their own bodies because the institution holding them declined to.
“This isn’t something that we have to suffer in silence about,” she said.
“We have to teach each other,” she said. “There is nobody else to teach us.”
That last line travels past the prison walls. It describes every room where a woman says plainly what she is feeling and is told it is nothing.
