2/24/2023 0 Comments Rename it tanhehill![]() ![]() ![]() (Aka, they were entirely predictable.)Īs late as 1977, the Houston Post ran an editorial that seriously asserted that calling hurricanes by the names of men would not be as effective as the existing evocation of shrews: “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.” Weather Bureau were myopic in their decision to continue using only feminine names. Because men often considered women unpredictable, vengeful, or generally stormy, the men at the U.S. “Weather Men Insist Storms Are Feminine,” blared a New York Times headline in 1972. An activist named Roxcy Bolton, who suggested that the storms be renamed “himicanes,” told the media at the time that women “deeply resent being arbitrarily associated with disaster.”īut as women like Bolton began to lobby for change, men ground in their heels. “It took a long time to reach a unified system, and bring democracy and regional representation into account.”Īs the 1970s rolled around, feminists were getting tired of the negative characterization of women that pervaded every facet of society, even in something as seemingly innocuous as the names of hurricanes. Historically, the names chosen “have been fraught with racism and sexism, personal preferences and vendettas,” according to Atlas Obscura. A book called Tempest, by Liz Skilton, documents this admission and chronicles the sexist history of the scheme. One was “Orpha,” after a woman in one of the bureau’s offices, and the other was “Wallis,” for Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, who scandalized the world by divorcing twice and then marrying King Edward VIII - who then abdicated the throne for her. When the identification system was officially introduced, only two names on the approved list were actually “picked with real people in mind,” said Ivan Ray Tannehill, the then-U.S. Weathermen were said to have chosen the names of their (ex-) wives or girlfriends to conjure that kind of rage, at least in their own heads. (Before that, human names weren’t usually involved.) Archival press clips show that men believed “people would not take storms seriously if names did not evoke images of female fury,” The Washington Post reported. But behind that single pronoun is a fascinatingly sexist history.įor some reason, Atlantic hurricanes were named after women for a quarter of the 20 th century, starting in 1953. As Hurricane Ida rips its way through the country’s Southeast - on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, no less - newscasters across America are referring to the storm as a “she.” Not odd, considering the name. ![]()
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