Ten Florida women sue for right to bare breasts
Seated together were 10 women, most of them middle-age and two who qualified as senior citizens.
"Ladies," Hooper teased her fellow plaintiffs that day last month, "we don't need to be taking our tops off."
Yet they are battling in federal court for the right to do just that.
Meet the girls and women who call themselves the Topfree 10, a group as diverse as the ordinances and attitudes governing women's breasts nationwide. They range from 14 to 74 years old.
The forces motivating them to pick this fight with Brevard County, Fla., vary nearly as much as their ages. About the only thing they have in common is the belief that they should have the same rights as men. Even when it comes to shedding their shirts.
And though legal experts say the lawsuit is likely to fail, the women are convinced the sun someday will shine on their cause — if not their bosoms.
"The issue is gender equality," said Hooper's mother, Marilyn "Smitty" Hooper, 74, grandmother of five and the lawsuit's matriarch.
Brevard's anti-nudity ordinance and two state statutes treat male and female breasts differently for no good reason, the women argue.
"I've seen men with bigger boobs than many of my friends," said the elder Hooper, a retired schoolteacher and social activist. "Judges equate female breasts with sex organs, and they're not. They're glands, and the judges have them, too."
Never mind that neither Hooper would take her top off in public even if they were to win in court. They just don't think it's right that the only legal way to bare their breasts in Florida is for the gratification of somebody else — either a nursing baby or a strip-club crowd.
"I don't think they'll find the courts very sympathetic," said Fletcher Baldwin, a University of Florida law professor. "Simply being topless, with all due respect, doesn't rise to the same level as, say, race discrimination. There is no compelling need — unless they all want to be longshoremen."
The suit was filed Sept. 3, and no trial date has been scheduled. The Topfree 10 began their battle about five years ago, when 9-year-old Athela Frandsen was about to celebrate her birthday.
The daughter of Melbourne, Fla., naturists Marvin and Jan Frandsen, Athela was disheartened to learn that the county's ordinance would require her to start wearing a top when she turned 10.
"When I was 9, I could take off my top to cool down in a hot car," said Athela, now 14. "When I turned 10, I cried because I didn't have the same rights as boys.
"Then Mom had the idea to contact a lawyer."
Then she called old friends.
There were naturists T.A. Wymer, 56, co-founder of a 26-acre nudist community in Fort Pierce, Fla.; Shirley Mason, 53, a Miami resident; and Kayla Sosnow, 36, a Gainesville, Fla., resident who was arrested in 1996 for indecent exposure and jailed 20 days for going topless in Osceola National Forest.
Frandsen knew Smitty Hooper from church.
Cathy Stanton, 68, of Melbourne, also was asked to join. As a direct descendent of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a pioneer in the struggle for women's rights, Stanton couldn't shy away from a good fight.
Laura Pinfield, 44, a middle-school music teacher in Indialantic, Fla., also signed on despite concerns that discussing it publicly might jeopardize her job, according to the other plaintiffs.
The 10th and most controversial plaintiff, Dian Hardison of Port St. John, Fla., came on board after the women's first lawsuit failed in state court in 1999.
Hardison, 46, was one of seven clothed nudists cited in June 1997 for picketing outside the entrance to Canaveral National Seashore in protest of a crackdown on nude sunbathing at Playalinda.
Four years later, she was fired from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for using government equipment to e-mail a friend a joke about President Bush. She pleaded guilty last month to sprinkling white powder in an envelope with her water bill and mailing it to the Cocoa water department. She faces up to 15 years in prison.
Laws regarding women's breasts vary from state to state and even county to county.
Kathryn Harper, spokeswoman for Seattle City Attorney Tom Carr, said it is not illegal to go topless in the city, per se. However, the city can charge people under the state's indecent-exposure law.
In a landmark case in New York, seven women were arrested in 1986 for going topless in a park. The women challenged the law that stated women could bare their breasts for "entertainment" purposes only.
The New York Court of Appeals ruled six years later that women could be topless in public.
"Some people feel men can't control themselves if exposed to the sight of a woman's bare breast, but that's a misconception," said Topfree 10 member Wymer, whose nudist community includes members in their 80s.
Hardison agreed: "If you saw half the people you work with naked, the last thing on your mind would be sex."
Seattle Times staff reporter Jim Brunner contributed to this report.