No fear of controversy

When it wasn’t fashionable to take on her causes she never shied away from controversy — and she got results. “She pioneer at a time when there was segregation here,” Cason added. “She was like a pitbull. Once she sank her teeth into a cause she never let it go until she got it.”

For instance, in November 1971, the Playboy Plaza Hotel in Miami Beach bungled when it placed Bolton on its mailing list and offered its facilities, should she desire, for National Organization for Women (NOW) meetings. Bolton was not about to dine in Hefner’s hutch and, from an antique desk in her Coral Gables home, she fired off a missive.

“Your colossal gall is exceeded only by my tolerance, despite the stress on my good nature,” she opened her letter to the club’s assistant director for sales. For Bolton, Playboy clubs represented the exploitation of women. “How would you like to walk around with a wad of cotton on your rear end?” she wrote.

Bolton’s name was removed from the Playboy Club’s mailing list. From Playboy to politics, as an early local leader of NOW, Bolton was instrumental in recruiting then-Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana to introduce in Congress the ultimately doomed Equal Rights Amendment.

She also initiated the push to have Aug. 26 designated National Women’s Equality Day, and helped National Airlines flight attendants fight for a contract to create maternity leave instead of firing its pregnant flight attendants, which had been the airline’s policy.

“She’s probably the best known feminist women’s activist here in Miami,” Joanne Hyppolite, former chief curator at HistoryMiami, said in a 2012 Miami Herald profile. “There were one or two people you would call and she was ours from the ’60s onward. She’s been the one really strong voice in our community.”

Bolton also helped establish Miami-Dade’s Commission on the Status of Women, Crime Watch, and the Women’s Park Women in