By: Northwestern MutualVoice Team

The decision was already made.

Patricia Stout was going to be a home-maker. At least that’s what everyone kept telling her as she grew up in Mexico City in the 1940s and ’50s. She was told she needed to learn how to cook and clean. There was only one problem: Stout didn’t want to be a homemaker. “People said, ‘She’s a little girl, she doesn’t need to worry about math,’ but I liked those subjects,” Stout says.

As a girl, Stout preferred the class-room to the kitchen, and she followed that passion to study business in college. Today she runs the Alamo Travel Group, which was barely breaking even when she took over the company in 1990. Now it is one of the largest privately held travel agencies in San Antonio, Texas, with a high-powered client list that includes major corporations and governmental agencies like the U.S. Department of Defense.

Stout insists she isn’t the sort of woman who would gloat or say ‘I told you so,’ but she doesn’t need to. Having joined the growing ranks of self-made businesswomen across the country, her accomplishments do the talking for her. She isn’t alone.

Indeed, when it comes to American entrepreneurship, it’s not a man’s world anymore. Women are opening businesses at a rate nearly four times higher than men, according to a recent study conducted by the National Women’s Business Council¹, and pioneering businesswomen like Stout have helped pave the way by refusing to accept limitations and succeeding on their own terms.

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