@5128gap. I'm catching up with this thread as of yesterday. There's a lot more on it, but I find your points interesting as they're picking up on a few persistent themes. Most persistent of all is the constant digression into meaningless statistics. This is a straw man. First, it doesn't matter what 'choices' other women make. It doesn't affect any of us personally, unless there's a quantifiable social disadvantage to making a choice that isn't feminist. In those cases, I might decide to put the needs of my family above that of greater society. It's only human.
Further, if '80% of all women' made the same decisions as mine, it doesn't validate them any more than the 20% figure suggests I'm somehow 'wrong'. That line of reasoning is ridiculous. It's ridiculous because it's only ever speculative. We can't know the variables: whether working full-time, 0.5 FTE, or not at all is influenced by other factors: mental or physical illness or disability, financial constraints, a desire for independence outside the home, profession vs. job, whether we love our work, hate it, or more realistically, love some aspects of it and hate others.
Barmy. It's completely subjective and not a quantitative picture.
Which brings us onto 'freedom of choice'. It very, very rarely is, hence the scare quotes. No one makes choices in a social vacuum. Everyone has to do things they don't like or want. It's a fundamental lesson we learn from our first years that life isn't always fair, and that everyone's answerable to something or someone. 'Choice' isn't a feminist goal for the very good reason that it's nebulous, and society is structured to make some choices very difficult indeed and others the only realistic option. Usually this applies if you're a woman. The aim of feminism is to level that playing field; only then will a somewhat 'freer' choice be an even remote possibility.
As for 'if work is so great why do people retire', I thought we'd already scraped the barrel of faulty exercises in logic until I saw this little gem. People slow down. They're not as sharp. Some jobs become more physically difficult. In my own profession, people retire from the daily, active elements of the job but it's not in the least unusual to see them pursuing the research side until they're fit to drop. I saw a lovely Emeritus who's long-since retired at a conference only last week.
As to the snide aside of being 'envious', the PPs who are posting this are evidently the type who think in this vein, or who believe what other women do is somehow a reflection on them. Those people are very obvious from this thread. I, for one, can't imagine a woman in this country I'd less want to swap places with than Kate Middleton.