n. The tendency to assume that the anxiety and stress felt by affluent mothers who have to choose between staying at home or pursuing a career, is felt by all mothers regardless of their socioeconomic status.
2006
Forty-three years ago, Betty Friedan called it "the problem that has no name."
Today, the problem has a name, alright. Lots of them. So many, in fact, that you need a bound glossary to keep track of all the trends and afflictions plaguing modern mothers.
Opt-out revolution. Intensive mothering. Domestic glass ceiling. Afflufemza. Choice feminism. Mother guilt. And, recently, mothers belting out the Boredom Blues.
Today, the problem has a name, alright. Lots of them. So many, in fact, that you need a bound glossary to keep track of all the trends and afflictions plaguing modern mothers.
Opt-out revolution. Intensive mothering. Domestic glass ceiling. Afflufemza. Choice feminism. Mother guilt. And, recently, mothers belting out the Boredom Blues.
2006
More and more these days, reading women’s writing fills me with a vague, creeping, slightly nauseating feeling. Lying in bed the other night, cradling some seltzer water, my stomach gurgling, the word for my malaise suddenly came to me: "afflufemza," wherein the problems of affluence are recast as the struggles of feminism, and you find yourself in a dreamlike state of reading firstperson essays about it, over and over again.
2006 (earliest)
I doubt Loh will make many friends in the publishing industry with her withering review of this book, but I thank her for giving a name — afflufemza — to this cultural phenomenon.