Since its creation, the Center has changed its character dramatically from a leisure- and volunteer-activity orientation to a no-nonsense commitment to devising ways for women to get back into the mainstream. Ruth Van Doren, the director of the Center, has a clear sense of the need it fills. "The middle-class woman is suffering, just as the poverty woman, for lack of productive work," she says, "And frequently she has been made to feel that the work incentive itself is shameful- that it reflects badly on her husband's earning capacity or on her own resourcefulness as a 'homemaker.' But this is changing. Women want an identity outside the family, and I hear an undertone in their voices that says, 'I will do this for me, now."