For women born after 1980, it may be hard to fathom a time when these rights and opportunities were unattainable. Yet this was America—just 50 years ago.
This year, flush with a dramatic increase in the number of women in elected offices locally and nationally, it is easy to forget the strides of decades past. It was 170 years ago in Seneca Falls, New York that Elizabeth Cady Stanton, mother of four, and Lucretia Mott, Quaker abolitionist, held the very first gathering of women’s rights and started a wave that continues today.
Successive waves ushered in the 1960s “Women’s Liberation Movement.” A Western World groundswell, it produced many of the equalities and freedoms women now enjoy. And the movement has never stopped. What’s known as the “Fourth Wave”—which includes the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements—has toppled more than 200 powerful men in positions across nearly every industry. On January 21st, 2017, fueled by anger and resentment, the Women’s March heralded a new era of female leadership. More than 100 women now serve in Congress, the largest number in history. In Maryland, some 71 women serve in the General Assembly, including 30 newly-elected representatives. And in Anne Arundel County, the county council has the first female majority ever.
In wide-ranging interviews, What’s Up? Media set out to discover the impact of these sweeping movements through the stories of five leading area women. Each is known for her success in business or industry. Each is a daughter of decades of struggle and triumph. Although most shun the term “trailblazer,” they have made a mark in their fields, often against hostility, subtle or overt. How did they do it? What obstacles did they encounter? What can they teach others from their accomplishments? And what’s next for them?
What Dad Said
Betty Buck tells a classic, feminist tale. President of Buck Distributing Company based in Upper Marlboro, she runs one of the largest Miller Brewing Company distributors in the mid-Atlantic states with more than 125 employees and annual sales over $50 million. Buck grew up knowing she wanted to follow her father, who founded the company in 1946 with one beer truck.
“I was my daddy’s shadow,” Buck says. “Instead of Barbies, I played warehouse. It meant I got to be with my dad.”
In 1985, he surprised his 28-year-old daughter by saying, “You’re hungry. I’m not anymore” and offered her the company. But there was a hitch: transfer of power required approval from the parent company, Miller, based in Milwaukee. A man named Leonard Goldstein was president of Miller. Buck knew him as “Uncle Lenny.” She flew to Milwaukee and was told to go to lunch and return at 2 p.m. When she returned, the conference room was lined with 20 vice presidents, all men. They presented her with a list of 12 classes she needed to complete, given only in Milwaukee. Over the next six months, she flew back and forth from Maryland to Wisconsin and completed the classes with 20 other students, all male. During this time her father suffered a heart attack, her marriage ended, and, as a single mom, her three children contracted chicken pox.
The upshot? When she returned to Milwaukee, she was given “another batch of classes.”
“That’s when I balked,” she says. “I let ’em have it. I told them I’d done everything you asked me while raising three children, my dad having a heart attack, and I’m the only company on the East Coast where the numbers are up.”
With that, Goldstein turned to his assembled group of male colleagues and asked, “Any other questions?” Buck got her contract.
That pluck, that air of self-confidence, is a trait all five women share. Most attribute it to the influence of their fathers.
Like Buck, Debbie Gosselin grew up into her father’s business. A lawyer and businessman who established a thriving marina and tour boat operation, Ed Hartman taught his daughter that one of her most important roles was to be a mother. After her own daughters were born and her first marriage ended, Gosselin knew she needed to take her career seriously. Frustrated with too many part-time jobs, she wanted to be her own boss. In the 1980s, she acquired Chesapeake Marine Tours from her dad and after that rebranded the company “Watermark.” But first, she had to earn it.
“It was an arm’s length transaction,” Gosselin says. “He did it out of his sense of fairness to my siblings and his wife, and because of his belief that people should earn what they have and not be given it.”
Dad also was a tremendous influence for Florence “Becki” Kurdle. Kurdle grew up “programmed to be a doctor.” A child of the 1960s, she attended Goucher College, where she discovered she hated chemistry, and Baltimore, too. But her dad urged her to explore. He had “tremendous influence” over her, someone who was “always behind” her. As she remembers him, she motions behind her shoulder, as though he’s still there.
Apparently, he was right. After she explored Baltimore, Kurdle found her calling in urban planning. Her first job for Anne Arundel County in 1966 was to identify countywide locations for air raid shelters. At that time, “you had to ask your commissioner” if you wanted a raise, and it was either $60 or $120. Kurdle received $60. Her male counterparts received $120. Why? She was told, “Because you are married.”
By any measure, Maria Scott, M.D, is one of the most successful physicians in the Chesapeake region. Born to traditional Italian, hardworking parents, she and her siblings were told they “could accomplish anything.” Moving to the United States when he was three, her father was a firefighter who presided over family pasta dinners every Sunday in their modest Philadelphia home. All three children excelled. Her brother became an engineer, her sister a venture capitalist, and Scott earned her medical degree and specialized in ophthalmology. Today, she presides over one of the largest, comprehensive eye-care practices in the mid-Atlantic area.
For Veronica Tovey, it was her mother who influenced her most. Growing up in New Hampshire in the 1950s, Tovey recalls her mother was forced to quit her job as a nurse when she became pregnant. The family needed money. So, her mother sought work at the local radio station “where no one could see her.” Challenged by the station director—“How can anyone let a woman say whatever she wants on the airwaves?”—her mother bought 15 minutes of air time. She then walked the streets selling spots to underwrite her program. It’s ironic that Tovey, as publisher of What’s Up? Media, finds herself “in the same media world as my mother.”
Doing It Her Way
Beyond parental influence, what propels these women to achieve is their own drive and spunk. Buck is up at 5:30 a.m. every morning to make sure beer trucks roll. Gosselin oversees water and land tours seven days a week. Scott personally performs an average of 60 surgeries per week and Tovey produces three full-scale monthly magazines. There’s a steady churning, a heady thrum, that emanates from and around these women. These women produce, and their energy is palpable.
Kurdle is quick to underscore that she actually had three careers: urban planning for 23 years, which included serving as Anne Arundel County’s Director of Planning and Zoning, a lead lobbyist for BGE subsidiary Constellation Properties, and consulting.
“It was easy to burn out,” Kurdle recalls. “The pressures of day-to-day decision making, seeing your name in the paper every day, late night community meetings, and everyone had a zoning problem. I learned early on to say ‘yes’ if you can; ‘no’ if you must.”
When asked how she fared in a largely male-dominated county government in the 1960s and 1970s, she mentions “style.” Unlike her predecessor in the planning office, Kurdle didn’t see herself as “one of the guys.”
“That wasn’t a fit for me,” she says. “I felt I needed to be more of a role model for the women in the office, how I dressed, how I dealt with staff. I wanted to be someone they felt good about having for a boss.”
For Scott, ophthalmology provided instant gratification. Diagnosed with scoliosis at age 12, she spent a year at Shriners Children’s Hospital, where she met other children whose disabilities would define them for life. She decided to become a pediatrician. During her third-year rotation in medical school, she saw an older man with his Italian family. He’d just had cataract surgery and could suddenly see, his vision restored to 20-20.
“Suddenly, the doctor was a rock star,” Scott says. “The whole family was elated.”
Even though pediatrics was a specialty that was more welcoming to women in the ’80s, she chose ophthalmology.
“Several people told me, ‘You deserve to be chief resident, but they’re probably not going to pick you because you’re not a guy,’” she says. “I think I was picked because I worked so hard. I tried to see the most patients I could. I embraced the work and attended every emergency.”
When Scott began practicing in Annapolis, there were only nine ophthalmologists, all male. She credits fellow physician Bill Aherne with offering her office space and getting her started. But it was her smarts that got her moving. Taking the medical staff directory, she made face-to-face visits to introduce herself. She accepted all patients, especially children. After all, their moms had parents who needed eye care, too. And soon her practice blossomed.
The path to What’s Up? Media was hardly direct for Tovey. When her first husband was under consideration for a high-level job with United Press International, his future boss insisted first on interviewing “the wife” before deciding to promote him. Later, she decided to become the first female stockbroker in Hawaii: “I didn’t realize then that there weren’t women stockbrokers,” Tovey says. After studying and passing an exam, she was told by a prestigious Honolulu firm that “females can’t work for us unless they are much older and they are there to service their husbands’ friends.”
“I was mortified,” she recalls vividly. Since Hawaii had recently passed an age-discrimination law, Tovey sued and won.
Ironically, when her husband was relocated to Paris, Tovey secured a job with a brokerage firm but never reported to work. She’d just learned she was pregnant. Several jobs later, including child care and starting a Manhattan plant business, she landed in Washington, D.C. with a new husband and a new job in the Jimmy Carter White House.
“Yes, it was exciting,” Tovey says. “I was in the West Wing two-and-a-half years. I could walk into the Oval Office. All my friends wanted to visit.”
But she concedes, “It was awful, too.” She endured long hours and little pay. Even worse, Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 meant she was out of a job. “No one wanted me,” she says. In typical Tovey fashion, she eventually found her niche through a friend and formed an investment company that raised venture capital money for oil and gas drilling or commercial real estate development. She began earning money and proudly states “a lot of money.” She acknowledges this is what allowed her to start What’s Up? Media and expand it into a multi-media business.
Gosselin, too, is on the move. Since acquiring her business from her father, who at age 92 remains a huge influence in her life, Gosselin has doubled it in size. She’s added land tours and expanded boating operations to Baltimore. With 20 fulltime and 200 seasonal employees, she recalls what her mother told her often as the first child of four—that she was bossy. Says Gosselin today, “I’m not bossy. I’m the boss.”
Finding Help and Seeking Balance
Even though these women stand out as singular achievers, they admit they had help along the way, first from spouses and then others. Many also changed spouses.
According to information from the U.S. Census Bureau, divorce rates in the U.S. have fluctuated over the last 50 years. From a low of 24 percent in the early 1960s to a high of 53 percent in the late 1970s, the figure has hovered around 50 percent since the ’80s.
Second and third marriages are common among our interviewees. Tovey credits her three marriages for encouraging her to do better. She asserts that each created in her a strong drive for achievement.
Only Scott remains wed to her first husband, an anesthesiologist at Anne Arundel Medical Center. Scott praises him for being so supportive of her career and sharing home duties for their two children, along with “Miss Bunny,” a nanny who has been like a grandmother to her two children.
Having raised four children herself, Buck now helps to raise the next generation. Buck starts each morning with breakfast at home with several of her six grandchildren. Balancing time with family, work, and community service is a constant challenge.
Involved in more than a dozen charities and business organizations, Buck is the first female chair of the Maryland Chamber of Commerce and the National Beer Wholesalers Association.
“I wish I had a nickel for every political or charity dinner I took my kids to, so that we could be together,” Buck says. “But my dad taught me, you make your living from the community. You gotta give back.”
For Kurdle, life seems defined by the nonprofit organizations she’s chaired: the Community Foundation of Anne Arundel County, Anne Arundel Medical Center, the YWCA, and, most recently, Goucher College. Reflecting on her multi-careers, she says, “In the ’50s and ’60s, we thought we could have it all. We really can’t. We always need to make choices. We need balance.”
As these women demonstrate, one way to ensure more family time is to include their children in their work. Buck is grooming her daughter Erin to help lead the business, an industry where only 22 of some 2,500 are women. Gosselin’s younger daughter, Ginny, now works fulltime for Watermark in operations management.
Learn as Much as You Can
Each of these achievers express a strong obligation to coach, mentor, and help mature those who will follow—both women and men.
What Tovey enjoys most about the magazine is “all the people I work with. They’re all young. Some have been here for 17 years. I’ve watched them grow and helped them to have good lives.” She sees herself as an entrepreneur and enjoys carrying out new ideas. Important to her is fun, but she also enjoys hard work. She tells young people in her office, ‘You can do it. I know you can do it.’”
For Buck too, most of her employees have been with her for 20 years. “This is my family,” she says. Her biggest challenge is funding their health care and retirement. As for advice to younger women, she recounts meeting the Chair of the Maryland Chamber of Commerce when she first became CEO. He gave her his number and said to call if she ever needed help. So, she called him just to see if he would answer. And he did.
She addresses women’s groups often and always offers her number. She tells young women: “Don’t be afraid to ask. Don’t quit. Just keep going.”
Scott is busy building her business. It took a big leap last year, growing from 120 to 250 employees with the goal of becoming “the eye care leader in the mid-Atlantic.” Still, finds time to mentor younger women.
“It’s a great feeling to be good at what you do. Get really good at something. Learn as much as you can. Always say ‘yes’—every opportunity can teach you something.”
Even though Gosselin just completed a two-year stint as the first woman commodore of the Annapolis Yacht Club, she downplays her feminist role. Her advice to younger women? “Forget about being a woman,” she says. “Focus on doing the job well. But you need to do it better because you are a woman.”
Kurdle forges her advice to younger women from her many years in management.
“I wasn’t afraid to be a leader,” she says. “I had enough self-confidence even if I didn’t know the whole job, I knew I could learn it. You need to understand that leading people is first understanding them. Believe you can do it. Know who you are and be the best you can be. Even if you’re not quite sure you are good enough yet, go for it.”
The Next Chapter
Given that women are living longer and healthier than 50 years ago, it is tantalizing to ask what any successful woman envisions for her next phase.
For those still growing their businesses, like Scott and Gosselin, major changes may be several years away. For Tovey, the next phase means more freedom and the opportunity to “do what I want, which I haven’t figured out yet. But I am happiest creating things that, I think, improve those around me, so I know I’ll find something.”
Usually a highly reflective woman, Kurdle pauses over “what’s next.” She admits to narrowing her interests. In her 80th year, she wants to “touch base” with people she most cares about. Having twin grandsons, age 20, and twin granddaughters, age 17, and another granddaughter, age 17, she wants to see them through college.
And then there’s Buck. Having conquered cancer more than once and managing a heart condition, she has no intention of slowing down. She’s completed 19 Windstar Cruises, most recently to Japan and Alaska. Her Kindle carries 500 books of romance, mystery, and history. She intends to stay in business and involved with the community. The only one of the five interviewees who doesn’t shy from the term “trailblazer,” Buck thinks of herself as one of a kind.
“It would be a lot easier if there were someone ahead of me, but it also makes it easier, too,” she says. “I can do it my way and ask for permission later.”
If there’s any doubt that this woman has an eye to the future, her front office says it all. Not one, but two Harleys greet visitors to the sprawling one-story campus that she has built. “I love Harleys,” she says. “They’re very freeing.”
And, of course, emblematic of all our trailblazers, Buck never hesitates to ride alone. In fact, she prefers it.