Florida feminist took the ‘her’ out of hurricanes
Roxcy Bolton, a pioneering and tempestuous Florida feminist, created a host of improvements for women in America, including founding the country’s first rape treatment centre. But she may be best remembered for helping persuade weather forecasters not to name tropical storms only after women.
Bolton’s crusade for the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have guaranteed constitutional equality for women, was unsuccessful. But she was instrumental in elevating the prevention and treatment of rape into priorities for law enforcement and health professionals; persuaded National Airlines to grant maternity leave to pregnant flight attendants rather than firing them; and pressured Miami department stores to eliminate the men-only dining sections in their restaurants. (She reasoned that “men and women sleep together; why can’t they eat together?”)
Her crusade to include men’s names when meteo- rologists differentiated hurricanes placed her at the eye of an international storm.
Women, Bolton said at the time, “deeply resent being arbitrarily associated with disaster.”
Following a long naval tradition of giving storms women’s names, just as ships are referred to by female pronouns, government forecasters adopted the practice in 1953, and applied it alphabetically.
Soon, weathermen — and they were mostly men — were applying sexist clichés to the storms, like suggesting that they were unpredictable or “temperamental” and were “flirting” with barrier islands or coastlines.
Bolton was not amused. The feminist leader Betty Friedan wrote in her memoir, Life So Far (2000), that as early as 1968, Bolton had “written me all incensed at the practice of using women’s names to name hurricanes.”
A year later, the National Organization for Women passed a resolution urging that the National Hurricane Center stop naming emerging tempests exclusively after women.
That the hurricane centre was in Dade County, Fla., where Bolton was from, made it an easier target.
Officials flatly rejected her facetious first suggestion that the maturing tropical depressions also be called “himicanes” and that the centre bestow storm names to honour its bloviating benefactors in Congress. After all, she said, “Senators delight in having things named after them.”
At the time, only one woman, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, a Republican, was in the Senate, and, as an ardent Democrat, Bolton had in mind headlines like “Goldwater Annihilates Florida.”
But a generation after Bolton began her campaign, the weathermen finally capitulated. (In addition to Bolton, the hurricane centre credited, or blamed, among others, the feminists Patricia Butler of Houston and Dorothy Yates of Miami.)
The second hurricane of 1979 was named Bob. When the 2017 season officially begins June 1, Bret, Don, Franklin, Harvey and José will be among the names immortalized.