I'm 35. I'm no career woman, because I like my time to be mine. Largely for reading. I don't want to read about people like myself, degreed types who want to be, um, heard. Rather read about coal miners, sailors, shtetl dwellers, and fairies. Doesn't everyone?

And, yes, stop with the snarky comments about non-career women. Writing for Salon doesn't make you all that, Rebecca Traister. Lord help me for even knowing your name.

Journalists these days often sound like those grindy kids grown up and telling people what to do. And here I am, reading this tripe.

To hell with all that. I'm going down to the pub.

If this new enterprise decides to lecture me, a la Linda Hirschman, about my choice to give up a career I hated to stay home with my kids for 15 years -- they are going to miss my demographic entirely. And they'll hardly be the first.

A lot of us on the Boomer/GenX cusp were caught in some real cultural wringers, which is why so many of us are now emotional and physical walking wounded. We were the ones who were supposed to work 50 hours a week, raise perfect kids, keep perfect houses, and have perfect marriages. It was only when we turned 35 and went bonkers that anybody realized that perhaps the whole feminist enterprise had over-promised, and needed re-thinking.

"Sequencing" (where it was possible) was a Goddess-send for many of us. It helped us understand life is long -- much longer than it used to be -- and is lived in chapters and stages. Some of these chapters are good for maximizing our financial status; in others, we're building the necessary social capital of family. Those, like Hirschman, who say that the time spent accumulating the former at the expense of the latter is a waste of time are making a calculation many of us regard as both soul-sucking and immoral.

On that day I quit work to be with my kids, I knew I was leaving myself financially vulnerable and dependent. I also knew that someday (and that day is here) I'd have to retool and start a whole new career in mid-life. So? I don't need Linda Hirschman and her ilk to assess the wisdom of that bargain on my behalf. I made it for myself, and I still think it was the right one. (Especially since I have one child whose life was literally saved by my being at home to give him the years of support and vigilance his condition required. Sure, I could have made a few hundred K in those years, had I been out of the house. It would not have been enough to compensate for his loss.) And I thought feminism was all about being able to make that choice. If it's not -- well, I've been a feminist for 35 years, but maybe it's time to turn in my card.

I'm ranting here, but I'm just so sick and tired of being invisible to the trend-watchers and demographics-slicers. I know dozens of women like me, who've made a wide range of decisions about our lives, and don't see ourselves reflected in any of the media aimed at our age group. The biggest mistake these publishers make is in thinking that 35-60-year-old women can still be sold a bill of goods, and need their advice to live our lives. At our ages, we can't, and we don't.

"Especially if the plots are all about harried yet glamorous women heroically juggling kids, career, and romance, in spite of the evil/clueless men trying to keep them down. Sprinkle in a few shopping sprees, and some light hearted man bashing and your there!"

As a 30-year-old woman with a career and a fun city life, these are exactly the kinds of books I avoid like the plague. I don't want to read books aimed at and marketed to woman my age. I just want to read good books. Lately I'm into Ian McEwan and Ernest Hemingway.

Can we give "opting out" moms a break?

I stopped working about 3 years ago to spend some time at home. While I still missing having a full dayplanner and the "edge" that comes from working deadlines and projects, I enjoy being with my children. Yes, there are sacrifices... we eat out less and enjoy less perks (and there's an unopened Social Security statement in my paperwork pile--I don't want to see the string of 0$ listed there). There are also rewards. Although our culture and society has chosen not to honor everyday service to others (cooking and cleaning, washing scraped knees, and delivering children to school and the pediatrician), it's a season in my life that other women, at least, should respect.

I don't expect kudos or even a mention from newspaper columnists, but I'm tired of feeling bruised after I read Broadsheet.

The constant slams in Broadsheet at women who don't work outside the home, and the snotty cheerleading for attacks made on those women (as well as all attacks made on men), is tiresome in the extreme, and is the single reason I am allowing my Salon Premium subscription to lapse.

This isn't feminism. It's Women-Who-Are-Just-Like-Me-Ism, and it's out of hand.

And if you don't play my way, I'll take all my toys home...

This editor is right on the mark--from the amount of chick-lit and lousy women's fiction out there, you would swear women had no lives outside of finding/getting/keeping a ma-yn; being endlessly humiliated as they discover being fashionable/popular/pretty isn't everything; or living the joys of being wifey/moo-cow (even if they spent most of the book realizing the dream didn't match the reality.) For all the RED HAT/older-women-starting again books, out there, the majority of women's fiction still stresses the usual love/popularity/beauty/motherhood stuff. It's rare to see a woman living a life that's about pursuing a vocation, or living up to ideals, or improving her talents, or establishing identity and independence--or that makes love/marriage a part of a whole, not the whole. Chick-lit and the generally dire state of popular women's fiction is one of the main reasons I've begun reading a lot more biographies. There are precious few characters out there now who have the complexity of someone like Martha Gelhorn or James Tiptree, Jr. And any fiction line that at least tries to get at some of that complexity--and how real women live--gets high props from me already.