The days of elderly women doing nothing but cooking huge meals on holidays and knitting themselves slowly into senility are gone.

　　Enter the Red Hat Society -- a group dedicated to the radical notion that old ladies should have fun.

　　"My grandmothers didn’t do anything but keep house and serve everybody. They were programmed to do that," said Emily Cornette, founder of a chapter of the 7-year-old Red Hat Society and one of the society’s nearly 1 million members who are mostly women over 50. The group has chapters in all 50 U.S. states and 25 countries.

　　While men have long spent their retirements fishing and playing golf, women have sometimes seemed to become invisible as they age. But the generation now turning 50 is the baby boomers , and the same people who rejected their parents’ way of being young are now forging a new way of growing old.

　　Throw feminism, a bit of disposable income and better health for most elderly into the mix, and the Red Hat Society starts to look almost inevitable.

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