Welcome back to my series on erased women in STEM, celebrating Science Literacy Week, Women’s History Month (in Canada) and the upcoming release of my new children’s book, THE MATILDA EFFECT: HOW 25 WOMEN WERE ERASED FROM HISTORY.
New here? You might want to check out previous posts in the series:
Rosalind Franklin: DNA Decoder (1920-1958)
Margaret E. Knight: Professional Inventor (about 1837-1914)
Ellen Eglin: A Lost Legacy (1800s)
Today’s scientific trailblazer, Eunice Newton Foote
Let’s begin with a quote from the September 13, 1856 issue of Scientific American, shall we?
The columns of the Scientific American have been oftentimes graced with articles on scientific subjects, by ladies, which would do honor to men of the highest scientific reputation; and the experiments of Mrs. Foot afford abundant evidence of the ability of woman to investigate any subject with originality and precision.
Just, you know. Don’t expect us to spell her name right while we are busy showering her with “compliments.”
Ahem. Where was I? Oh, right. Eunice’s experiments, the ones that made her just as good as man of science (at least according to the reporter quoted above).
Eunice was interested in a major scientific question of her time – why Earth’s climate had changed over its millions of years of geologic history. And her experiments with atmospheric gases proved that climate is influenced by the amount of carbon dioxide in the air.
That’s right. Eunice uncovered a major mechanism of climate change, six years before John Tyndall did the same (he published in 1861).
The rule in polite scientific society is that the first person to make the discovery has “priority,” meaning they are supposed to receive credit for that discovery. But until very recently, John Tyndall has been recognized as the father of climate change, while Eunice has almost completely faded away.
What’s up with that? How did this groundbreaking climate scientist get erased from STEM history?
Some believe that John Tyndall used Eunice’s work without giving her credit—a textbook case of the Matilda Effect. Others are convinced that Tyndall (who was British) had never heard of Eunice (who was American); they were simply taking a similar approach to the same question, and coming up with similar conclusions. That happens all the time—when I was in graduate school, a friend of mine submitted her research paper to a scientific journal that had just received an almost identical paper from a totally different group of scientists. To their credit, the journal published both reports, back-to-back in the same issue, so my friend and her accidental competitors shared priority on that discovery.
Back to Eunice and John Tyndall—if this was mere coincidence, why did Tyndall get famous and Eunice got forgotten? Because women are erased from history in at least six different ways, and Eunice was a victim of the most common and insidious: the pervasive, persistent belief that stuff men do is more interesting and important than stuff women do.
In 2011, Ray Sorenson stumbled across an 1857 account of Eunice’s experiments. Since then, a lot of people have made it their mission to tell her story—and like Rosalind Franklin, this “scientific lady” is finally getting the credit she deserves.
Read more about Eunice’s experiments in THE MATILDA EFFECT: HOW 25 WOMEN WERE ERASED FROM HISTORY, brand new next month! And subscribe to my email newsletter to receive a FREE Women’s History Month Resource Kit. Subscribers who pre-order THE MATILDA EFFECT get some extra bonus goodies, too, including an exclusive ticket to the virtual book launch.
Tomorrow: Jeanne Baret: Globe-Trotting Botanist