Chick lit is a term used to describe a type of popular fiction targeted at younger women. Widely used in the 1990s and 2000s, the term has fallen out of fashion with publishers while writers and critics have rejected its inherent sexism. Novels identified as chick lit typically address romantic relationships, female friendships, and workplace struggles in humorous and lighthearted ways. Typical protagonists are urban, heterosexual women in their late twenties and early thirties: the 1990s chick lit heroine represented an evolution of the traditional romantic heroine in her assertiveness, financial independence and enthusiasm for conspicuous consumption. The format developed through the early 1990s on both sides of the Atlantic with books such as Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale (1992, US) and Catherine Alliott's The Old Girl Network (1994, UK). Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996, UK), wildly popular globally, is the "ur text" of chick lit, while Candace Bushnell's (US) 1997 novel Sex and the City has huge ongoing cultural influence. By the late 1990s, chick lit titles regularly topped bestseller lists, and many imprints were created devoted entirely to chick lit. By the mid-2000s, commentators noted that the chick lit market was increasingly saturated, and by the early 2010s, publishers had largely abandoned the category. The term "chick lit" maintains an afterlife as a popular category for readers and amateur writers on the Internet. Origins of the term In 1992, Los Angeles Times critic Carolyn See was probably the first to spot that a new style of popular women's fiction was emerging. Though she didn't use the term chick lit, in a review of Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale, the critic noted that McMillan's book was not "lofty" or "luminous" but was likely to be highly commercially successful. Carolyn See wrote, "McMillan’s new work is part of another genre entirely, so new it doesn’t really have a name yet. This genre has to do with women, triumph, revenge, comradeship." Chick lit did not become an established term for a style of novel until the second half of the 1990s. "Chick" is American slang for a young woman, and "lit" is a shortened form of the word "literature." There was probably no single origin of the term: Princeton University students were reported in 1988 to use chick lit as slang for a course on women's writing and, in the UK, Oxford Reference report that the term arose as a