Kim Yong-sook, 58, a former airline attendant and businesswoman, is the founder of a group called Ajumma are the Pillars of the Nation, which seeks to boost the image of often-maligned middle-aged Korean women.

SEOUL — Kim Yong-sook is fed up, and she's not going to take it anymore.

She's weary of women between the ages of 30 and 60 being ridiculed as selfish and unstylish — bossy, gossiping magpies with bad perms who pinch pennies and hog seats on the subway.

They're known as ajumma, a word long applied to married women with children but which in recent years has taken on a pejorative connotation that irks Kim. Among many South Koreans, it's now often used to conjure an image of homemakers who disdain full-time jobs to while away afternoons on park benches, in coffee shops and at social clubs, bragging about their children and, if they've got the money, go on shopping sprees.

At 58, Kim has empathy for her fellow ajumma, who she insists have too long been misunderstood and ridiculed. Ajumma are not deadbeats, cracks in Korea's economic engine.

"Actually, we're running the nation," Kim said. "We've got one foot in the house and one foot in society."

A decade ago, Kim formed a support group called Ajumma are the Pillars of the Nation. Since then, she has attracted thousands to her declaration of independence. She's written a book and consults with businesses and government. Her message: Ajumma unite! Don't take the snickers, behind-the-back finger-pointing and jibes lying down!

Kim figures there are more than 10 million ajumma, married women with children. She sees them not as being forgotten or overlooked women but as a force that can be harnessed to make their own individual statement.

Kim has become a role-model for South Korean mothers in search of a new cultural identity. When she married decades ago, Kim said, wives in the then-more-conservative culture were expected to bear children, cook and keep the house clean, nothing more. Leave the important work, like earning a living, to us, husbands would say. But Kim was having none of it.

She worked as a flight attendant and television actress and later started her own clothing manufacturing business. But the business went bankrupt. She was sued for back taxes, and, without money for a lawyer, she said, she was forced to represent herself.

Despite the disadvantage, she won her case. But another, more personal, verdict hit hard.

Kim saw that the world had changed. Young men no longer wanted their partners to do nothing more than stay home and bear children. Now they expected double incomes to survive the roller-coaster South Korean economy.