Active in public health, nursing education, and other social service, educational, and philanthropic work, she succeeded her husband,
Chester C. Bolton, in office a few months after his death in 1939. Upon election to the remainder of her late husband's term, Bolton refused the customary widow's allowance comprising the remainder of the salary her late husband would have collected had he served out his term. She represented the
22nd District, which mostly consisted of Cleveland's eastern suburbs. Bolton served an additional fourteen terms, serving alongside her son,
Oliver P. Bolton, for three of those terms. A confidential 1943 analysis of the
House Foreign Affairs Committee by
Isaiah Berlin for the British
Foreign Office described Bolton as Serving on the
House Foreign Affairs Committee, Bolton called Secretary of State
John Foster Dulles in May 1954 after the fall of the French base at
Dien Bien Phu, urging him to invite nurse
Genevieve de Galard to the United States. When Galard arrived in July, Bolton described her as a "symbol of heroic femininity in the free world". After receiving the
Presidential Medal of Freedom, Galard was received at a dinner for three hundred in Congresswoman Bolton's home district of Cleveland while on a tour of the country.
Civil rights Bolton voted in favor of the
Civil Rights Acts of 1957,
1960,
1964, and
1968, and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
House Foreign Affairs Committee In 1955, she became the first American woman member of Congress to head an international delegation, using her own resources to fund it. As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Africa, she felt it was her responsibility to visit as much of Africa as possible. Arriving in Senegal on September 1, she spent the next six weeks crisscrossing the continent by plane, train, boat, and car. Her important stops included Liberia, Ghana (then still known as the Gold Coast), the Belgian Congo, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa, and Ethiopia. She met with leading nationalists such as
Kwame Nkrumah, politicians such as
Haile Selassie, and leading women, such as the Queen Mother of the Tutsis. She also spent much of her trip visiting schools, talking with the youth, and meeting with women from all walks of life in markets or clinics. As someone with a lifelong interest in education and health care, she prioritized these issues during her African travels. When she returned to the United States, she submitted a report to Congress. One of her recommendations was that Congress should create a new State Department Bureau for African Affairs to be overseen by a new assistant secretary of state for African affairs. Congress created the new bureau in 1958. In addition to sharing information about her trip with Congress through her official report, Bolton also made an effort to enlighten the American people about the diversity of the African continent by creating a film about her trip, entitled
Africa: Giant With a Future, 1955. This has been made available on DVD by the National Archives. Bolton's trip helped to begin the process of opening doors for women to play a major role in U.S. foreign relations. One of Bolton's most lasting achievements was her sponsoring of legislation to purchase property across the
Potomac Riverfrom
Mount Vernon, the home of
George Washington. This prevented commercialization of the area and preserved its appearance as it was when Washington lived there. Bolton was regarded has having a phenomenal relationship with her constituents of Italian-American heritage and was known for mailing government child-care pamphlets to homes where new babies had been born. The
nursing school at
Case Western Reserve University is named in her honor for her accomplishments and generosity in the field of public nursing.
Later life After rising to become ranking minority member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Bolton was defeated in a bid for a sixteenth term in 1968 by
Charles Vanik. She was, until
Louise Slaughter's continued service in 2012, the oldest woman to serve in the House of Representatives. Bolton retired to her family home, Franchester (named for herself and her late husband), in
Lyndhurst, Ohio. ==Personal life==