Akademik

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.

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.

—Andrea Gordon, "Mudslinging moms," The Toronto Star, September 9, 2006

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.

—papundit, "Afflufemza," Media Bias Watch, April 22, 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.

—Sandra Tsing Loh, "Rhymes With Rich," Atalntic Monthly, May 1, 2006