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The Florida housewife, who convinced President Nixon to declare the first Women’s Rights Day in 1973, is thrilled that the Fort Bragg community continues the tradition she started.

“It is wonderful,” said Roxcy Bolton, who began her involvement in struggle for gender equality in 1969 when she was denied access to a department store dining room. The day, now called Women’s Equality Day, was marked with a Aug. 18 program at Pope Theatre, sponsored by the Team Bragg Equal Opportunity community.

“I was with my three little children at the Burdine’s department store and there were no seats in the ladies dining room,” Bolton said.

“There were plenty of seats in the men’s dining room and they were all laughing and having a great time. When I was told I couldn’t sit in the men’s dining room I was very angry,” she said.

To her way of thinking, it did not make sense that a dining room with empty seats would deny women, who were the majority of the store’s customers — especially ones, like her, who were shopping with small children, she said.

When Bolton got home, she said she wrote a letter to the store’s management with a complaint and a threat.

“I told them I made the best tuna salad sandwiches in Florida and I would give them 30 days to change their rule. If they didn’t I was going to stand in front of their restaurant and sell my own sandwiches,” she said. “On the thirtieth day, they changed the rule.”

Bolton, who was married to a career Navy officer, said the incident opened her eyes to other examples of unequal treatment that needed to be changed.

The housewife contacted U. S. Sen. David J. Gurney, who in turn contacted the president, she said.

In the next three years, Bolton was invited by Nixon to participate with his task force on women’s rights and responsibilities and the Labor Department’s new sex discrimination task force, and she advocated for official federal recognition of female equality, she said.

On Sept. 12, 1972, Gurney wrote a letter to Bolton informing her that the following year, Nixon would declare Women’s Rights Day to coincide with the granting of female suffrage, she said.
Although Bolton said she is happy, and women now enjoy more opportunities than were available to them in 1969, Bolton said she is most proud of the personal role she played in a young woman’s life.

One day in the early 1970s, Bolton was approached by a local woman with a hunched back, she said. “She told me that all her life she had worked as a laundrywoman and if her daughter didn’t go to college, she would be a laundrywoman, too.”

The woman told Bolton that the Family did not have the money to send the girl, a musician, to college, but she would have the money with the G.I. Bill, if she enlisted in the Army, she said.
The girl had passed the audition to play in an Army band, but she needed glasses to read sheet music and the Army would only grant vision waivers to male musicians, she said.

“After I heard this story, I picked up the phone and called the White House,” Bolton said.

With one phone call, Bolton was able to change the rule and the laundrywoman’s daughter enlisted in the Army as a musician. “Years later, the daughter found me and thanked me. She told me that she had gone to college and was able to have a great life because of the favor I did for her and her mother.”

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