Roxcy Bolton, a pioneering and tempestuous Florida feminist who was credited with founding the nation’s first rape treatment center and who helped persuade national weather forecasters not to name tropical storms after women only, died on Wednesday in Coral Gables, Florida. She was 90.
Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her son.
Bolton’s crusade for the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have guaranteed constitutional equality for women, was unsuccessful.
However, 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?”)
She also played a role in persuading then-US president Richard Nixon to proclaim Women’s Equality Day in 1972 and in recruiting then-US senator Birch Bayh to introduce the Equal Rights Amendment.
The US Congress sent the amendment to the states that year, but another woman, the conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly, galvanized opponents and the amendment failed after not enough legislatures ratified it.
A scrappy, card-carrying member of the Daughters of the Confederacy armed only with a high-school degree, Bolton typically jettisoned her southern gentility to pursue her agenda of causes 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 “deeply resent being arbitrarily associated with disaster,” she said.
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 cliches 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, 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 the US National Hurricane Center to stop naming emerging tempests exclusively after women.
That the hurricane center was in Dade County, Florida, where Bolton was from, made it an easier target.
Officials flatly rejected her first suggestion that the maturing tropical depressions also be called “him-icanes” and that the center bestow storm names to honor its bloviating benefactors in Congress.
After all, “senators delight in having things named after them,” she said.
A generation after Bolton began her campaign, the weathermen finally capitulated. (In addition to Bolton, the hurricane center credited, or blamed, among others, the feminists Patricia Butler of Houston and Dorothy Yates of Miami.)
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