In this blog, Harrison Croft examines the life and legacies of Eunice Newton Foote, highlighting her groundbreaking contributions to early climate science and humanitarianism. 

On the afternoon of 23 August 1856, Eunice Newton Foote presented her research, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays”, before the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Chronicling the event a few days later, New York’s Herald offered high praise, declaring that her “heart was only equalled by the extent of her acquirements and the grasp of her mind”, and that her findings were “beneficial to science”.

Those findings explained the process by which Earth’s atmospheric temperature could increase as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels: known today as the greenhouse effect. Writing up her results in the American Journal of Science and Arts, Foote became the first published American woman physicist.

Yet Foote’s pioneering contributions extended far beyond the academy. As well as being an inventor, she was also an avid anti-slavery, anti-alcohol, and women’s rights campaigner. Through Foote, we see how science and society coalesced in mid-nineteenth-century New York.

Science and Social Justice in the Nineteenth-century United States of America

A few years earlier, in 1848, Eunice and her husband Elisha had been signatories to the Declaration of Sentiments. That document, produced at a women’s rights convention in New York State, offered a damning indictment of male authority, including lines such as: “he has not ever permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise”, and “he has endeavored… to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life”. The declaration demanded equal rights, including the right to vote.

Alongside this work, Foote was also involved in the anti-slavery movement. Although emancipation had already been achieved in New York earlier in 1827, full emancipation across the country remained elusive for decades. New York’s abolitionist Manumission Society concluded its work in 1849, but when the Footes relocated to Washington, D.C. in 1865, their activity in the broader abolition movement continued apace.

Mary Foote, one of the couple’s daughters, married a keen anti-slavery senator who passed the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery later in that year. In this and many other ways, science and society were intertwined in Foote’s life and work.

Environments and Erasure

Alongside these social transformations, Foote was also working in and responding to the latter part of the Industrial Revolution. This had seen tremendous changes, including rapid urbanisation as formerly rural families flocked to promising manufacturing hubs. It was also during this time that global capitalism came to supersede mercantilism, and that the first indications of humans’ impacts on Earth’s atmosphere on a planetary scale were detected.

Whether or not the origins of the Anthropocene lie in this historical moment remains a topic of ongoing scholarly debate. Foote could not have foreseen the significance of her brief, one-page 1856 study, but within decades, newspapers around the world were warning of a rapidly warming atmosphere driven by coal burning.

Before long, Foote was forgotten by the scientific community. A full century passed before her important contributions were rediscovered by feminist historians in the 1970s. In the meantime, work on the greenhouse effect continued, but without reference to Foote’s pioneering experiments.

Most famously, debate continues on the question of whether John Tyndall, the Irish physicist credited with discovering the greenhouse effect in 1859, and one of Foote’s contemporaries, was familiar with her work. Many of Tyndall’s biographers are ambivalent on the question of priority, with Roland Jackson writing that Tyndall “often exhibited surprise at women’s intellectual capabilities, and though he imagined that women could understand anything revealed by the savants, he did not believe they had the same powers of imagination and discovery”.

On the other hand, Jackson also points out that many scientists based in Europe were unfamiliar with Foote’s work in the eastern USA, as her name was absent from the period’s “correspondence, journals, or published papers of the critical physicists”.

Foote’s biography reminds historians of the entangled issues of gender, environment, race, class, and justice, extending otherwise more recent questions of intersectionality further back into the past. Having studied at an elite women’s preparatory school, Foote nevertheless crossed class lines in aid of other Americans. Foote’s relationship with the environment was at once local and planetary. And her environment was not strictly atmospheric.

Reflecting on the development of meteorological science in Victorian Britain, Katharine Anderson has offered that “knowledge-making and intellectual life now seems much more heterogeneous”, than it once was. Foote similarly disrupts this distinction between the history of science and social history, and invites new questions on their entanglements.

Involving herself in many of the social justice issues of her time, Foote’s situatedness in relation to the environment was also humanitarian. Her legacy was only recently returned to the climate history corpus, yet academics and activists alike might take much from her example.

Harrison Croft is a PhD candidate and Assistant Lecturer at the School of Philosophical, Historical, and Indigenous Studies, Monash University, on unceded Boon Wurrung Country. His research interests are in more-than-human and climate histories, and his PhD thesis is investigating how human, animal, and plant relationships with Birrarung (Yarra River) changed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Harrison is a HDR co-representative on the Executive Committee of the Australian Historical Association, and a member of the European Society for Environmental History’s Sustainability Committee.

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