Dr. Betty MurrayHelping Women Navigate Menopause | Speaker, Author, and Advocate for Women's Health Over 40

Women Hold It All Together

9 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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In this excerpt from her YouTube video, Dr. Betty Murray frames midlife women as the ‘load‑bearing walls’ of their families, emphasizing that they support the household in ways that cannot be easily altered or removed. She describes how the sandwich‑generation pressures—caring for aging parents while still supporting children—force women into extensive unpaid caregiving labor. This labor pushes careers, romantic partnerships, and personal self‑worth to the margins because women lack the bandwidth to attend to them. Murray also points out the disconnect between the growing online conversation about unpaid women’s work and the lack of tangible societal support, highlighting a gap between acknowledgment and action.

Chapters

The truth is, is as women, when our body's changing underneath it, we are the load-bearing walls of our household, right? You can't knock a hole in it. You can't rearrange it. Women in the family unit are the load-bearing walls, and nowhere else is this more true than the midlife woman. And when you're stuck in a situation where you're caring for other family members, that's usually not a, hey, I could choose differently. We are in it. And careers are often sent to the side. Our relationships with our partners are often off to the side because we don't have the bandwidth. Our relationship to ourselves, our sense of self-worth, all of that becomes difficult. And so the reality is, is also that sandwich generation is a lot. And I think the acknowledgement that we see online is also not being seen in the world, right? We have a lot of women just talking about the unpaid labor, but we don't necessarily see society joining in the bandwagon.