Roxcy Bolton, Feminist Crusader for Equality, Including in Naming Hurricanes, Dies at 90

[JSngry]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/21/us/roxcy-bolton-dead-feminist-hurricane-names.html

Her crusade to include men’s names when meteorologists differentiated hurricanes placed her at the eye of an international storm.

Women, Ms. 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.

Ms. Bolton was not amused. The feminist leader Betty Friedan wrote in her memoir, “Life So Far” (2000), that as early as 1968, Ms. 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 center was in Dade County, Fla., where Ms. Bolton was from, made it an easier target.

Officials flatly rejected her facetious 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, 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, Ms. Bolton had in mind headlines like “Goldwater Annihilates Florida.”

But a generation after Ms. Bolton began her campaign, the weathermen finally capitulated. (In addition to Ms. Bolton, the hurricane center 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. .....

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 Center 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 skeptical: “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, Ms. 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, which are viewed as stronger and more violent.

“The stereotypes that underlie these judgments,” Sharon Shavitt, a professor of marketing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and one of the study’s authors, said in a statement at the time, “are subtle and not necessarily hostile toward women — they may involve viewing women as warmer and less aggressive than men.”