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It's International Day of Women and Girls in Science. So let’s rewind to the mid-1800s and give some love to Eunice Newton Foote, the grandmother of climate science and a campaigner for women’s rights.
First image is a mashup of Foote’s 1856 paper, reporting on an experiment she designed to test how different constitutions of air might have different outcomes for heat. “Carbonic acid gas” is carbon dioxide.
And as you can see here, she connects the dots some folks are still struggling to wrap their heads around 165 years later: “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature.” CO2 = planetary warming. As @ayanaeliza says, Eunice tried to warn us.
Second image shows signatories to the Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848, crafted during an early women’s rights convention. It lays out dimensions of women’s disenfranchisement and the unjust laws oppressing half the population. Frederick Douglass (lower left) attended...
...and kept the bar high for what got included in the declaration. His newspaper The North Star called it the "grand movement for attaining the civil, social, political, and religious rights of women." Eunice Newton Foote and her husband Elisha both signed (upper & lower left).
Given her commitment to advancing gender equality and to understanding Earth’s atmosphere, we like to imagine that Eunice was the first climate feminist. I wish I could include an image of her, but we don’t have a single one. It’s a shitty metaphor for what happened...
...Her work was forgotten, and she was erased from the history of climate science until about a decade ago. So, let’s make up for lost time and raise a glass (tea, whiskey, whatever your pleasure) to Eunice Newton Foote...
...reflecting on just how much she could have achieved with equitable access to resources, training, support, collaborators, and without inequitable barriers and burdens. And let’s do better by climate feminists today.
