Nichola Gutgold
Margaret Chase Smith. Patsy Mink. Pat Schroeder. They’re names that don’t appear in a lot of history textbooks, but if Nichola Gutgold had her way, these women (and many others) would be talked about in classrooms and around dinner tables when conversation turns to political pioneers. “These are all women who’ve run for president, and a lot of people don’t even know who they are,” Gutgold says.
Gutgold—a professor, researcher, scholar and author—has dedicated the majority of her professional career to shining the spotlight on female trailblazers (some household names, others not) and to supporting efforts that empower and advance women across the board.
Gutgold, who grew up in a small town outside of Hazleton, says she was fortunate to have a strong female role model in her life from a young age: her own mother. “She was the architect of the family, if you will,” Gutgold says. And yet, when she began to explore possible career options, she found very few women she could emulate. “The only examples of professional women were [television news] broadcasters and the teachers I saw in my classroom,” says Gutgold. Still, she was destined to break new ground in her own right: She was the first person in her family to graduate from college. And not only did she earn the right to don the collegiate cap and gown, she was exceptionally expeditious about it—Gutgold was just 20 years old when she earned her double major degree (mass communications and English) from King’s College. “I was in a big hurry,” she explains. “I wanted to go out and get a job.”
She worked in public relations and advertising for a few years for clients such as the South Mall in Allentown, and while she found her work fulfilling—“It forced me to reach out into the community and get to know people in all kinds of business,” she says—there was another career, and a lot more classroom time, waiting in the wings. “I thought I would just get a bachelor’s degree and that would be enough,” recalls Gutgold. But the academic itch was strong. She first earned a master’s degree in speech communication from Bloomsburg University, and then sought a Ph.D. in speech communication at Penn State. Ultimately, a dissertation she completed for the latter would change her life both personally and professionally. The subject was Elizabeth Dole, wife of Senator Bob Dole who ran for U.S. President in 1996. Gutgold remembers watching Elizabeth Dole speak at the Republican National Convention that same year. “I was thinking, she isn’t allowed to speak about herself as a candidate. It was all about her husband,” says Gutgold. Elizabeth Dole had led the American Red Cross for nearly a decade in the 1990s, served in the cabinets of two prior presidents and would make her own run for the White House in 2000, and yet, many people still identified her primarily as Mrs. Bob Dole. It was an eye-opening moment for Gutgold, indicative, she says, of a bigger problem that’s pervasive in American society: “In many ways, women have been kept from leadership.”
Gutgold’s dissertation would become the basis for a book, Elizabeth Hanford Dole: Speaking from the Heart, co-authored with Molly Wertheimer, and published in 2004. By that time, Gutgold was in the early years of her teaching career at Penn State’s Lehigh Valley campus, and she was diving into her research on women who have been back-burnered throughout history, and on the rhetoric of women in male-dominated fields. “It wasn’t that long ago that women couldn’t have credit cards, or have a mortgage in their name,” she says. And yet, Gutgold says her students are incredulous when she tells them that a woman who showed up to traffic court wearing slacks in the not-so-distant 1960s could be sent home to change, or to return with a husband or father.
Nichola Gutgold
Of course, it’s certainly true that women have made strides in the socioeconomic stratosphere over the years, and it’s also true that many women, Gutgold among them, haven’t felt stifled in the same way that perhaps earlier generations have. “I feel like I’ve had all of the opportunities that I could have possibly had,” she says. But that may be more of a testament to the tenacity of Gutgold herself. “I’m pretty fearless. And I’m very vocal,” she says.
Indeed, Gutgold, a married mother of two adult children, who calls Allentown home, has amassed an impressive resume over the past 20 years. Currently a professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State Lehigh Valley, she received a Teaching Fellow Award from the university in 2016. This year, she was honored by Lehigh Valley Business as a Woman of Influence. She’s been quoted in the New York Times, NPR and U.S. News and World Report. Gutgold has authored six books solo, including Seen and Heard: The Women of Television News, Paving the Way for Madam President and The Rhetoric of Supreme Court Women: From Obstacles to Options. In addition, she has co-authored books for both adults and kids, such as Madam President: Five Women Who Paved the Way, which, according to her official biography, is a children’s book based on research of women and the American presidency.
Recently, Gutgold has branched out to fiction. It will be no surprise to those familiar with her passions that the central figure in Just Like You is a strong female character. “She’s a person who you might think: she has it all,” says Gutgold. But there’s plenty more to the story, she promises, including murder, ambition, romance and even a twist. Gutgold enjoyed the writing process so much that she’s already working on a sequel, of sorts, featuring the daughter of her original protagonist.
Meantime, her scholarly work continues, too, although lately she’s been exploring a new topic, one that might make some people squirm. “We live in a youth-centered environment,” says Gutgold. “Death and dying get left out.” She explains that one of her goals is figuring out how to frame a life that includes showing death in a more positive light. That’s not to say she’s abandoning her area of academic expertise—she’s also working with two other professors on a book about world leaders outside of the United States. Naturally, it’s not lost on Gutgold that, while other nations have elected and embraced female presidents and prime ministers, the U.S. has yet to follow suit.
And that’s one of the reasons why, despite her myriad of personal successes, Gutgold knows there’s still work to be done. “I know that the statistics aren’t as optimistic as I am about my own life,” she says. She’s referring to, among other still-unresolved issues between the two sexes, the persistent wage disparity, and yes, the lack of a female U.S. Commander in Chief. But Gutgold thinks we’re getting closer in the latter category. “I believe in my lifetime, we’ll have a woman president,” she says. She was encouraged by Hillary Clinton’s recent run. “She was presidential,” says Gutgold. “That’s progress. We were not there before 2016.” Gutgold believes the first woman to win the White House could be someone whose name may not even be part of the current political dialogue. She points to a speech delivered by a then relatively unknown Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, which thrust him into the national spotlight. She is optimistic that history may repeat itself. “There is a woman out there who is going to make a blockbuster speech, who is going to ride the wave,” she says. “We just haven’t identified her yet.”
In the meantime, Gutgold says she’ll continue to seek out ways to be impactful in her own life. “I want to pay forward what education has done for me,” she says. “I tell my students, make the most of it. It’s not enough to just get through.”
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