At the suggestion of the Jessie B. Cox Foundation, Discovery makes a special effort to reach out to minority groups in its recruiting process, Strimling says.

"We had hoped 50 percent [of participants] would be women of color," says Newell Flather, a spokesman for the foundation. Of 20 students in last year's first Discovery class, eight were members of minority groups.

Although the Discovery program is unusual in its focus on business management, it is following in a line of organizations and programs that have being started nationwide to help women returning to work.

"As time has gone on, women have not been able to stay home for 15 to 20 years," says Donna LeClair, director of the Bay State Centers for Displaced Homemakers, which serves more than 2500 of Massachusetts' 310,000 displaced women annually.

"Even if you worked part-time, employers don't look at that in the same way as working 40 hours a week," LeClair says.

Many displaced homemakers--of whom there are currently more than 11 million nationwide--did not fit into the groups aided by state or federal programs until the national and state networks for these women were created in the late 1970s, organizers say.

The category of "displaced homemakers" came to national recognition in 1978 when two California women, Laurie Shields and Tish Sommers, organized the first national convention, held in Baltimore, for women reentering the work force. In 1979, the Displaced Homemakers National Network was established, says Jean Cilik, program assistant for the network's central office in Washington D.C.

The whole movement took off in the 1970s, when two California women [Shields and Sommers], one divorced and one widowed, realized that there were no resources out there for them," says LeClair. "They were too old for youth programs, too young for Social Security. They weren't poor enough for welfare, but they had barely enough money to support themselves."

The national network acts as a coordinating agency for programs across the country and lobbies for groups that require funding on a federal level, Cilik says. The groups offer a wide variety of services, from job retraining to counseling to daycare. "We call it a movement because once there was a name given to the movement it mobilized the situation," Cilik says.

The problems of returning to work have grown more serious in recent years because of rapid technological advances. New skills are necessary--such as computer literacy--so it has become increasingly more difficult for women re-entering the work force to find jobs. "Jobs are going to become more technical. There needs to be some kind of training," Cilik says.

Training is not all these women need. Building the confidence of these women is one of the main goals of state and national programs. Although it is privately funded, Discovery is directed toward fulfilling the same goals.

Women in the program say it has increased their self-confidence and their abilities in the workplace while helping them move toward their long-term career plans.

"My life turned 180 degrees around," when she found out about displaced homemaker programs, says Marcia L. Mason, 56, a Discovery student who is concurrently writing a masters' thesis at Vermont College.

Another member of the program, Lischen Singare, says that when one becomes self-supporting, "You're trying to swim and you might sink or drown. You really do need support when you're on your own." Singare--who has two young children--has begun her own business marketing educational materials that have a multi-cultural emphasis. She says the courses she has taken at Radcliffe have facilitated her endeavors.

"I had taken a business course [elsewhere]," Singare says. But she adds that the Radcliffe program has been indispensible because it has given her an overall picture of business management methods. "You're able to see how you fit into the larger picture, and you have to be cognizant of that," she says.