CHILDHOOD DREAM
Feminist force of nature who raged at ‘sexist’ hurricane names
Roxcy Bolton, a pioneering and tempestuous Florida feminist who was credited with founding the United States’ first rape treatment centre and who helped persuade its weather forecasters not to name tropical storms after only women, died last Wednesday in Coral Gables, Florida. She was 90.
Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her son David Bolton.
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; persuading National Airlines to grant maternity leave to pregnant flight attendants rather than firing them; and pressurising Miami department stores to eliminate the men-only dining sections in their restaurants (“Men and women sleep together; why can’t they eat together?”).
She also played a role in persuading President Richard Nixon to proclaim Women’s Equality Day in 1972 and in recruiting Senator Birch Bayh to introduce the Equal Rights Amendment. Congress sent the amendment to the states that year, but another woman, the conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly, galvanised opponents and the amendment failed after not enough legislatures ratified it.
A feisty, card-carrying member of the Daughters of the Confederacy armed only with a high school qualification, Bolton typically jettisoned her Southern gentility topursueheragendaofcauses that may have initially seemed unfashionable. Her crusade to include men’s names when meteorologists differentiated hurricanes placed her at the eye of an international storm. Women, Bolton said, “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, US 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, such as 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 Organisation for Women passed a resolution urging that the National Hurricane Centre stop naming emerging tempests exclusively after women. Officials flatly rejected her facetious first suggestion that the maturing tropical depressions also be called “him-icanes” and that the centre bestow storm names to honouritsbloviatingbenefactors in Congress. After all, she said: “Senators delight in having things named after them.”
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 on 1 June, Don, Franklin, Harvey and José will be among names immortalised.
Roxcy O’neal was born on 3 June 1926, in Duck Hill, Mississippi, a town of several hundred, to Hayward and Lula O’neal, both farmers.when she was eight, she told the Miami Herald, she decided on her career goal: to go to Congress. “Sometimes on the way to school the bridges would be washed out,” she recalled. “I wanted to be a congressman so I could build bridges.”
Twoyearslater,anotherlocal event left a lasting impression, and became a catalyst for her involvement in the civil rights movement: Two black men were lynched, and the entire town turned out to witness the grisly spectacle.
After attending high school in Duck Hill, she moved to Florida and married William Charles Hunt, a former Coast Guardsman. That marriage ended in divorce. Their son, Randall, died in 2000.
In 1960 she wed a Brooklynborn Navy commander, David Bolton, who had been the chief war crimes prosecutor in the South Pacific after the Second World War and later became president of Men for the Equal Rights Amendment. He died in 2004. In addition to their son David, Bolton is survived by another son, Buddy, and a daughter, Bonnie Bolton.
In 1974 she founded what has been called the US’S first rape treatment centre at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. It was named the Roxcy Bolton Rape Treatment Centre in 1993.
She helped form the Florida chapter of the National Organisation for Women in 1966.
While the Equal Rights Amendment fueled the culture wars of the 1970s, the controversy over hurricane names, in its own way, struck a responsive chord among both genders. Women considered it just one more insult by oblivious men who were buttressing a stereotype. Some men dismissed it as a tempest in a teapot, while others even warned that it was potentially dangerous.
“It’s doubtful that a National Hurricane Centre bulletin that Tropical Storm Al had formed in the Gulf or Hurricane Jake was threatening the Texas Coast would make us run for cover quite as fast,” the Houston Post opined in 1977.
By 1986, the Washington Post was still sceptical: “Eight years, and still this nonsexist nomenclature has a funny ring to it. Somehow many of the male names don’t convey either the romance or the urgency that circumstances might warrant.”
For all the scoffing, though, Bolton’s crusade might actually have helped save lives.
A study published in 2014 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that, in fact, storms named after women have historically killed more people.
The study concluded that people do not take those storms as seriously as those named for men, who are viewed as stronger and more violent. © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service
“Sometimes on the way to school the bridges would be washed out. I wanted to be a congressman so I could build bridges”