A decade after her passing, Betty Quadracci’s legacy endures in her hometown of Milwaukee. She was tenacious, overcoming severe childhood polio. She was a teacher, mentoring young children in the South as a young woman and establishing a Montessori school back home in Wisconsin. She was an entrepreneur, helping her husband Harry found Quad (formerly Quad Graphics), which has become a worldwide printing and marketing company. She was a leader, shepherding this magazine for 30 years and shaping an ethos of community-building that endures in its pages today.

This is the fifth cohort of Milwaukee women we’ve honored for carrying forward Betty’s indomitable spirit as they make our community better with their own brands of tenacity, creativity, fearlessness and support of women. We invited the 2023 Bettys to a roundtable conversation with editor-in-chief and publisher Carole Nicksin that touched on many facets of modern womanhood.

Meet the Bettys

TENACIOUS B

Gabriela Parra

STANDOUT SISTER

Meagan Johnson

GROUNDBREAKER

Kristina Ropella

ARTS ADVOCATE

Della Wells

BRIDGE-BUILDER

Kimberly Kane

QUADRACCI FAMILY AWARD

Ann Merkow

Roundtable:

CAROLE NICKSIN: My first question is for Dr. Ann. You are, to my knowledge, the only person at the table who knew Betty Quadracci personally. Please tell us a little bit about her.

ANN MERKOW: Where do you begin with Betty? The first thing that pops into my mind is “strong.” She had polio as a child and survived through an iron lung at Children’s Hospital, with no visitors allowed during her stay. Later in life, she and her husband, Harry, developed the printing company Quad Graphics, which was very innovative at the time. This was in a day and age when there weren’t women founders or executives, so she had to fight for women to rise to whatever level they wanted to be at. She also had four children. It was challenging to balance children and a career. Still, she and Harry were very big on giving back and philanthropy, even as they started the company from scratch.

CN: Thank you, Ann. The first question for everyone is a big one: What does it mean to be a woman in the 21st century in the United States?

DELLA WELLS: We have to fight the same fights we did in the 20th century. As a young woman, I lived through movements toward civil rights, feminism and reproductive rights. I used to be involved with African Americans for Choice, a pro-choice organization, fighting for reproductive rights. Now we’re fighting for the rights of women again. We’re repeating history.

KIMBERLY KANE: In the 21st century, being a woman leader is an opportunity and a responsibility. We need to make sure women coming up the ranks have opportunities we didn’t have. I want women in leadership to think about what it means to lead like a woman, being more inclusive, thinking about the impact of our decisions. Part of that is recognizing there are different stages in our careers and lives. We get married, become parents, and eventually our parents may need our help. We can’t just expect people to be in the office 8-5, five times a week. We need to ask, “What do you need to be successful?”

KRISTINA ROPELLA: Amen to that. As leaders, we’re given opportunities to change habits of the past. Now more than ever, there are so many opportunities available to women. We’ve broken through barriers, which is great. I was putting my kids in day care and working full time when it was highly controversial. I heard a lot of criticism. Today, my daughter and her friends work full time with kids, and no one thinks twice about it.

However, I think we are still dealing with some practices of the past. I still sit with men who are my contemporaries or older who think every woman in the room is their assistant, and I have to protect the women I work with from that. There’s this underground commentary about what women should be doing in the workplace.

AM: I told my daughter she was really lucky to grow up in a time when she could participate in high school sports, because she had so many opportunities. Now I look around, and I see we’re going backwards a little bit. She’s going to have to fight.

CN: It is interesting that progress is never a straight line.

KR: I worry that as women we tend to have this “I need to be superwoman and do everything” mindset. There are only 24 hours in the day, and you are only one person. It’s important to be able to say no and know you don’t have to be everything to everyone.

CN: When you were considering various career paths, did being a woman factor into your decision-making process? Gabriela, you’ve mentioned how few Latina women there are practicing law. I’m wondering if you saw yourself as filling that gap, or was it intimidating?

GABRIELA PARRA: Generally, it’s really hard for our community to support us, for us Latinas to believe we can reach any profession. We’re far behind in helping our youth dream big. That’s especially true for a woman who typically doesn’t leave the house at 18 like in the Anglo community. When I was considering law school, my parents had a hard time accepting it. Our community expects us to fail, so they limit us to protect us. If not for some colleagues of mine encouraging me on my path, I might still be in Green Bay working as a secretary or at a bank. 

It was also very difficult for my family and community to understand why I’d be an immigration attorney, because the expectation is you should help people for free. Now, my family is proud. But I had to overcome some negativity, some barriers that they put in my way, to be able to accomplish that. I kept pushing through.

KR: You know, Gabriela, I have the privilege of working with students with similar stories every day. I often have Latina women in my office in tears because they want to live on campus, and they want to be part of the school community. They have so much potential, but they feel similar pressure from family. I’d love to connect you with them, because they need to hear your story and how you’ve managed these things.

GP: One thing people don’t realize about Latinos is that we have a responsibility to our parents and families. If you have a task that day, and your parents are asking you to interpret for them, you drop everything. We’re held responsible for that, even as we’re studying or working. 

But resilience is one of the biggest things we get from our families and community. No matter what you’re going through, you find a way, but I think some of the community and family expectations can jeopardize our ability to meet our goals if we don’t learn how to say no or manage it. We really need to begin those conversations with our families, but that’s really hard to do.

MEAGAN JOHNSON: I have a unique story in that I never entered the professional workforce after college. As a stay-at-home parent, I discovered there was a basic needs resource that didn’t exist in our community and accidentally set off to launch Milwaukee Diaper Mission.

CN: This is an interesting question for you, Meagan, because your work is so focused on helping women. So instead of looking at your gender as an obstacle, your gender is sort of the basis of your impetus to create this.

MJ: Absolutely. As a parent and a menstruator, these are issues that I deal with in my own personal life, and it’s easy for me to understand and want to support others in the same space. So I think being a woman has inspired me to work within this space and in turn lift up other women.

KR: For me, my career path was all about whether I could balance family and work. I had a lot of conversations with myself and others about this. Whatever career I chose, would I be able to have a family, too?

DW: I never thought about gender in choosing a career even before I was an artist, or as an artist. In the art world, what’s currently hot is women artists and artists of color. The same is true for local and old artists. They’re just trying to fill the canon of art history. That’s part of the business, the trends. For me, you just have to focus on yourself and what you want as an artist. 

AM: I was a tomboy growing up. My mother had a hard time understanding it, but my dad would tell her, “Marian, she’s different.” He wanted me to do my thing. He was my mentor. He told me I could do anything I wanted to do. 

KR: It was also my father who encouraged everything I did, from math and science to sports. My mother was a little more traditional. She probably gave me the hardest time when I started my career about not being home with my kids.

KK: My dad used to joke that he was disappointed that my twin sister and I were girls. So he put us in boys sports. As young girls, we were bigger than the boys on our teams, so we had an advantage. It was a bit of a power trip to tackle the boys. In an interesting twist, that remains an advantage to me today. Sure, in the work world, you walk into a meeting and might be the only woman. But guess what? You’ve been there before. Are you going to let that be a disadvantage, or are you just going to be you? We can see our gender as a challenge or look at it as an opportunity.

DW: My sister and I grew up with six brothers, and we’d always fight back and beat them up.

KK: It takes so much courage to be authentic when you’re the minority of the room. But we need to find ways where our collective experiences are a strength. A superpower.

DW: I think that’s something that took me a long time to learn. I could never make art before I was 42 because I was always worried about what people saw, about people liking me. I think a lot of us don’t go after our goals because we’re too worried about being pretty or what people think.

KR: I think Kimberly said something really important, which is our gender being a superpower. I like to say our superpower as women is our ability to love and care for others. Because of that, I think women leaders are much more courageous in talking about love and relationships in the workplace.

KK: It’s important to make sure your employees and team members feel that. We’re together a lot and depend on each other a lot. Make sure they know you care about them. As women, we can help bridge that gap.

MJ: I think that goes back to the question about being a woman in the 21st century and creating a culture within the workplace that’s supportive and nurturing. My office is all women. I hope I’ve created a space where they feel safe, where they feel like they can have emotions and they can talk about their personal lives and also do their jobs. There’s room for both. I’m proud Milwaukee Diaper Mission has that, and I see it in so many other workplaces, too. I think it’s something that we as women really value and prioritize.

KR: We’re vulnerable, so we allow others to be.

MJ: Going back to authenticity, I think it’s important to ask questions you might be afraid to ask. I think we’re still in a place as a society where we feel like we have to know everything. I’m often in spaces with people who are a bit more experienced than me. I work really hard to make sure I ask questions. I say, “I don’t understand that. Can you please explain that to me?” It’s easy to just nod your head and look like you know what you’re doing and then never learn anything from that experience. And not learning something from an experience is way worse than being embarrassed by asking the question.

CN: That’s good advice. What are some standout pieces of advice that have stuck with you?

DW: I have one piece of advice that Evelyn Terry, a local artist, gave me. When I’d draw and say it was ugly, she told me, “Keep working with it.” You may run into mistakes and problems, but you have to keep working. I thought about that, and she’s right. It’s just like life.

AM: I’m old enough, so I’ve learned a lot over the years. Once, my daughter called me and said, “Something you told me actually worked.” I said, “I’m sitting down, what was it?” She told me, “I killed someone with kindness.” Looking at something through someone else’s eyes can really temper a situation, and it really helps you treat someone with kindness.

KR: The best advice I got from more than one mentor is “Better is often the enemy of good.” I use it a lot with my faculty and staff when I see them stalled, waiting for perfection. My motto at the college is “Just get started, we’ll figure it out along the way.” It’s OK to make mistakes. My mother was very good to us, but she was very critical. I try very hard as a parent not to be that person.

GP: As someone who has gone through a lot of criticism, the best advice I got from a mentor was to really think about where the criticism is coming from and how much I care for that person. If I don’t care that much, then I need to move on. If I do care for the person, I need to take the time to educate that person about why that wasn’t right.

KK: The advice that continues to resonate with me is, you don’t have to do it all at once. We’re wired to take on more than others to prove something. I’m a mom of four, in addition to owning a company. You’re not going to be able to please everyone, but you can prioritize. Maybe we need to let go of the idea of balance and embrace how we prioritize our time. We need to make sure we’re taking care of ourselves. When we do that as women, our children thrive.

DW: In my 20s, my friend and I would always get into things we didn’t want to do. So we made a pact that when someone asks us to do something, we’ll tell them we will think about it and get back to them. I learned no is a very powerful word. We don’t have to say yes to everything.

KR: Yes. It’s OK to say no. Opportunities are going to keep coming up. That’s part of prioritization.

CN: I’m curious about to hear more about the influence your mothers had on you.

DW: My mother went 19 years untreated with schizophrenia, back in the ’50s and ’60s. Once I asked if I could go play with the neighbor, she told me no, the FBI would get me. As a kid, I thought everyone’s parents were like “Leave It to Beaver.” I found out I wasn’t the only one who grew up with a parent with a mental illness. I do want to mention that even though my mom couldn’t be there and I didn’t have my dad, I had my godmother, who was a great influence.

AM: One of the reasons my husband and I came back to practice here in the area is because our parents were here. My mother was the best nurturing mother. She was a maternity nurse, and she taught me how to take care of babies when I was a kid. When I became a parent, she would take care of the kids when we were both on call at the hospital. Now, I do everything I can to make sure I can support my kids because they’re all in medicine one way or another, and I couldn’t have done it without my mom.

KR: My mom definitely put us first. She had stayed home with us and my dad worked, but at one point, she had to work so we could buy a home. I remember her in tears coming home from work, telling me she didn’t know if she could do it. When I started working and raising my kids, I thought, “How did she do this?” As you get older, you often appreciate what your mother did for you.

KK: My mom was a superstar. That generation was a bridge between women who didn’t work, didn’t go to college, and where we are today. I remember her going to work in the ’90s with big shoulder pads thinking, why do you want to look like a man when you go to work? Why don’t you just be your little petite self? That’s the persona women had to take on, trying to be accepted in the work world. My mom was the primary breadwinner, and she experienced discrimination in the workplace. I learned about strength and resilience from her.

GP: I learned resilience from my mom, too. She worked evenings, so I was helping raise my two siblings.  Even though she wasn’t really there to raise us, she instilled in me and my sister to work hard. Many of our extended family members experienced domestic violence. I learned from her to always find a way to take care of myself, so if I’m in a situation like that, I can leave. I ended up marrying a man from Mexico, and nine years later, he’s still the one that takes care of the kids and goes to their events so I can work late. He’s helped me get to my goals, and I’m very blessed.

MJ: I’d like to bring my dad into the conversation. I think my parents shared the workload equally, which inspired how my marriage is now. My mom worked her butt off when we were little kids. My dad is a musician, and he mostly worked at night. He took care of me during the day, and my mom did at night. They both equally inspired who I am and where I ended up in my career and how I am as a parent and spouse.

CN: This is always interesting to me: Do you think of yourself as competitive?

KR: I’m definitely competitive, even if I try to deny it. I think I’m mostly competitive with my expectations for what I can do and truly using my strengths.  It was never really so much about comparing to others but with myself, and what I have to do to get somewhere.

MJ: I think being competitive can be healthy. I also think about collaboration over competition a lot. For me in the basic-needs-bank world, there are organizations doing similar work in tandem. We’re here to support each other. Working with other nonprofits, some people think there’s a competitiveness in that space. I’ve never experienced that. There are so many that want to work together for the greater good.

DW: I don’t think about competition. I think about creating my work. It inspires me when I see other artists accomplishing things, but I don’t focus on that.

KK: I grew up in a very competitive world. It was all about beating boys on teams. For me, now, it’s more about being successful. I don’t think it’s healthy to compete against others at work. I have a company of about 20, and we’re growing. If we’re competing against anyone or thing, it’s ourselves. With competition, it’s about keeping your eye on the goal you’ve set, working hard and collaborating if needed to achieve it.

GP: I am unlearning competition. As Latinas in predominantly white spaces, our community makes us believe there is only one seat for one Latina female, and we all have to compete for it. If I have that mindset, I won’t be willing to share my resources with others. I want to unlearn this mindset. It keeps us from connecting. Anytime I catch myself feeling that sense of competition, I make myself step back and try to put someone else ahead of me.

DW: I will say in the African American art community here, we’re pretty supportive of each other, but I think part of it is my generation. We didn’t have anybody to make that happen for us.

GP: That’s amazing. It’s been really hard for me to find attorney Latino mentors. When it comes to mentorship, Latinos often share just enough so someone won’t fail, but they also won’t surpass you. In our generation, I believe whoever is in a position of power should help others open doors.

DW: Yes, we have a responsibility to help the next generation open doors. To teach them to help the next generation. That’s how things are going to change.