For the women in the study, becoming older, wiser, and more at peace with oneself made it easier to be playful, even to be a bit outrageous. As they aged, they found it easier to express their playfulness, to care less about what people thought about them, to affirm their right to be who they were. When we were younger, most of us experienced the pressure of having to achieve and compete, to do things correctly, or to follow other people's rules because we didn't trust our minds. Now there is an increased sense of self-worth and of permission to have fun. One woman said "I tried to do much more than was possible when I was young. I put so much pressure on myself, not trusting there was a whole life there to unfold."¹

Over 50, Dana now laughs at the faux pas she commits instead of putting herself down for being clumsy or dumb. She admits she felt dumb a lot in her younger years. The greatest trade-off of having stiff joints at 56, says Risa, is that you can laugh at yourself and feel better about it. Ivy adds, "I no longer wonder about whether I can cut it. I don't think I'm afraid of success. I have a sense that I'm good, and that's not nagging me any more."

These women seemed to take themselves less seriously as older people now, realizing that for all their planning and worry, events are still unpredictable. "No matter how hard you try, it doesn't seem to make one bit of difference in the end!" said one mother in the study. Freer of responsibilities and less accountable to others, they are able to let go of the need to control and to be controlled.

One of the powerful influences on older middle-class women's approach to play is having grown up in a social system that prepared them, more exclusively than young women today, for housework, mothering, and emotional and physical care-giving. As wives, mothers, and caretakers of others, women have been variously regarded as childish, silly, passive, foolish, and scatter-brained-men's playthings and sexual playmates. In effect, these so-called childlike characteristics became learned survival behaviors, in no way reflecting women's abilities to think and act with intelligence and competence. And it may be that only in the home or in private life do we find the love, nurture, and playfulness absent from the "public" marketplace. Male socialization has been serious and task-oriented, concerned with separation, power, and control; women's lives are seen as less ordered and predictable. Some feminists feel that the compensatory strengths developed by women as a result of being "other," i.e. marginal to the public sphere, are the very strengths and skills needed today to save the planet: attributes of care, connectedness, and concern.

Because women do not conform to traditional male definitions of what is considered humourous or playful in our society, some have never considered themselves playful. The participants in my study said, "We don't play competitive games and we're rotten joke-tellers." Since most joke-telling is at the expense of women and other minorities, it's no wonder that we are not very enthusiastic about it as a pastime. Nor is taking centre stage in mixed company considered respectfully feminine. Our humour tends to be in the shape of informal story-telling that describes the foibles of our personal lives and which generally takes place in groups where we feel trusted and at ease. Feminist studies indicate that humour is experienced differently according to who has the power in an interaction, to whom the humour is directed, and what is "at stake" (see Wischnewski).

The way we learn can also be an expression of playful inclinations. One woman puts it this way: "There's something related to the stance of being a learner - that one approaches one's experiences, one's life work, as learning. It is the same as approaching it as a player." When a playful attitude is not present, learning is diminished, and for some women, impossible. In describing the connection between play and the way they learned, the women in my study unanimously agreed that "play opens me up to learning." A playful approach has the potential to release censors which inhibit and control our thinking and feeling. This was expressed by the women as "releasing the steel bands around my body of knowledge," "opening doors," "opening up possibilities," or "enabling me to see things in new and different ways." One woman called play "the great lever which allows all of my intelligences to interact." For some of the women the risk in taking a playful stance was always preferable to what is predictable or routine. Ivy explained: "With a task, if I know how to do it, it gets boring. It has to be an adventure. I don't want to know how to get there. That's where the fun is. Your whole being is working. I don't like doing things that have been done before. I need the self-discovery notion in everything I do. If you add predictability, you lose me."