As a partner at a consulting firm, Christine Millen, 61, had a fancy job title, an executive assistant, a hectic schedule, the companionship of colleagues and the pride of being a pioneer in her profession. 

So when retirement loomed, she knew there would be yawning gaps in her life. "What do you do all day?" she asked friends who had left the working world. "Then what do you do?" she pressed, unsatisfied by the first answer. "What do you do on weekends? How do you even know it's a weekend?" 

Ms. Millen's lament echoes those of countless men, and their fathers before them, who have shriveled in retirement. But Ms. Millen is among the first of a generation of women to succeed in traditionally male professions, to define themselves by their jobs as much as their families and to face retirement wondering, "Without my work, who am I?" 

Just as women like Ms. Millen blazed a trail into the workplace, experts say, so they are breaking new ground on their way out, recycling familiar techniques from the women's movement that helped them advance in the first place.
"These are paradigm-breaking social innovators," said Ken Dychtwald, founder of Age Wave, a research and consulting firm that focuses on baby boom retirement. "They are wired for change." 

The old model of retirement - a condominium in the sun and a daily golf game - is working for neither men nor women, Mr. Dychtwald said, but women are "more practiced and comfortable moving from one way of defining themselves to another" and thus more likely to redefine their retirement years.

Already, seven years before the first of 76 million baby boomers reach 65, women's organizations are forming around the challenges of retirement. These groups offer practical advice, a forum to challenge assumptions about aging and intimate conversation reminiscent of consciousness-raising groups.
There is also a growing self-help literature, sometimes gender-neutral but often focused specifically on women. 

Ms. Millen, a partner at Deloitte until 2001, and Charlotte Frank, 69, the director of procurement for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey until 2002, are co-founders of the largest of the new groups, the Transition Network. It was born of their realization that there was no training or orientation for retirement as there was for work, as well as a determination to recycle the talents that vaulted them to success. 

The group has doubled in size in the last year, to 600 professional women 50 and over, and spawned imitators, including two start-ups, Project Continuum, for alumnae of Barnard College, and WomanSage, in Orange County, Calif. 
All three groups borrow concepts from the growing literature of baby boom retirement, including "Don't Retire, Rewire," by Jeri Sadler and Rick Miners (Alpha, 2002); "Women Confronting Retirement," an anthology of first-person essays edited by Nan Bauer-Maglin and Alice Radosh (Rutgers University Press, 2003); and "Time of Your Life: Why Almost Everything Gets Better After 50," by Jane Glenn Haas, a columnist at The Orange County Register and founder of WomanSage (Seven Locks Press, 2000). 

These groups and books have an elite audience, women whose careers were stimulating enough to miss and lucrative enough to provide a comfortable future. Far more common, among working-class men and women, is a welcome retirement free of exhausting or boring labor or, conversely, a time of penny-pinching or unwanted part-time employment. 

The women at a recent meeting in Midtown of the Transition Network, by contrast, have the luxury of introspection. So they hung around long after a series of presentations about volunteer projects, sipping wine and helping one another grapple with uncomfortable new identities. 

Susan Ralston, 65, was adjusting to being a consultant, going to the office only one day a week, after 20 years as an editor at a major publishing house. "You know those hollow molds" at do-it-yourself pottery studios, she asked? "I look at them and think 'That's the shape I used to be, and there's nothing left inside.'"

Sure, Ms. Ralston has other roles: wife, mother, grandmother. But, she had come of age just as women were discovering that "what was going to give you value was work," she said. "And it wasn't work if you weren't paid for it,'' she added. "I'm having a hard time abandoning that model."

Gail Rentsch, 61 and the owner of a public relations company, wondered how she would introduce herself once she stopped working.

"You have to script it," said Fran Brill, 57, who left a career as chief administration officer at a design firm to care for an aging parent, a form of retirement often thrust upon women but rarely men. 

Ms. Ralston appreciated the commiseration, a centerpiece of T.T.N.'s programming, which includes monthly peer groups, where eight to 10 women meet to discuss a stage of life that some sociologists compare to adolescence in its turmoil. 

The peer groups - more than the larger seminars on financial planning, second careers or caring for dying parents - mark T.T.N. and its imitators as a female invention.

"Men don't do this talking stuff easily," Ms. Haas said in Orange County. "When was the last time you heard, 'Hey, Joe, I lost my place in the world?' That's not part of the macho thing." 

Women, more often than not, talk freely to each other about the downward spiral of once-bright careers. "It's no fun watching the young Turks pass you by," Ms. Millen said. "The world is at their feet, as it once was for you, and that's very painful." 

Sometimes, the solution is a second career. Trudy Owett, 75, left magazine publishing to become a therapist. Dianne Fezza Sacco, 58, took her Wall Street pension and is now a holistic health counselor. 

For Ms. Haas, a demotion at The Orange County Register became an opportunity. Eleven years ago, "after putting the state's attorney in jail for corruption, covering presidents and popes, being on the front page all the time," she was shuffled from the business section to features, to cover the elderly. "Talk about feeling diminished," Ms. Haas said. 

Instead, Ms. Haas expanded her portfolio. Along with her popular column, she is a regular on television and the lecture circuit. Like T.T.N., her organization, WomanSage, offers salons where women can discuss everything from their heartache and exhaustion as caregivers to whether they should have a facelift. (She did.) 

Ms. Millen and Ms. Frank were also imaginative when the time came to downshift their careers. Ms. Millen gave up administrative functions to work only on projects. Ms. Frank switched to a four-day week. 

But Ms. Millen was forced into full retirement after Sept. 11, 2001, when "the bottom fell out of the consulting business," she said. 

Ms. Frank had the opposite experience. She had already trained her replacement when the terrorist attack destroyed the Port Authority's headquarters and took the life of many of its employees. Ms. Frank delayed her exit to assist in the recovery. 

But Ms. Millen and Ms. Frank, brainstorming in their living rooms, were well on their way to turning their own experience into an innovative organization. Volunteering, for instance, is "a cruel way to start retirement," Ms. Millen said, if it means doing menial work "for a 22-year-old boss who doesn't know you can do her job with one hand tied behind your back." 

Ms. Millen, Ms. Frank and Jane Lattes, 67, who has run the volunteer services department at several museums, did not want accomplished women knocking on the doors of nonprofits and winding up licking envelopes. Instead, they auditioned organizations in need of volunteers, demanding free rein to develop new programs if they brought members on board. 

At the Marte Valle Secondary School, on the Lower East Side, Natalie Tucker, a retired Board of Education administrator, commands an army of T.T.N. volunteers who have restored and restocked the library, organized student book clubs and monthly visits by professional artists.

At the Pearl Theater, an acting company on St. Marks Place, T.T.N. volunteers have designed new marketing materials, studied the viability of opening a book and gift shop and started a play discussion series. 

The last is Susan Ralston's project and it's bringing new subscribers to the Pearl. Backstage tours and open rehearsals could come next. New T.T.N. members crowded around, at the recent "Volunteer Showcase," asking how their literary and corporate talents could also be put to use. 

Ms. Ralston brightened. She is in charge of something that is a creative and commercial success. She is mentoring grateful young professionals. The only problem, Ms. Ralston tells the fledgling volunteers, is "you don't have job titles." She laughs, ruefully. Some habits are hard to break.