CHANGE IS IN THE AIR

A decidedly tardy tribute to a brilliant 19th-century scientist and suffragist.

Starting with a title appropriate in both the literal and figurative senses, Donnelly follows Eunice Newton Foote (1819–1888) from childhood on a New York farm to a scientific education at the daringly innovative Troy Female Seminary. From there she continued on to active participation in the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, which produced the suffragist Declaration of Sentiments. Later, inspired by recent evidence that the Earth was once hotter than it was at the time, she set up an experiment that proved that carbon dioxide played a crucial role in warming the atmosphere and thus the planet—five years before John Tyndall, the supposed father of climate science, reported the same. Though Foote published two scientific papers in her lifetime (the first American woman to do so), her contributions went largely unrecognized until 2011. Happily, Donnelly pays proper tribute to this unusually well-educated woman, clearly describing her atmospheric experiments in lucid, sharply honed prose. Just as importantly, she frankly acknowledges that worthy though their cause was, suffragist leaders excluded Black women and men from their demands for equal voting rights. Change might have been “in the air,” but not for all. A small, straight-backed figure in voluminous period dress, Foote poses in the illustrations surrounded by evocative contextual clues, from contemporary marchers to abstract geometric shapes, plus glimpses of fossils and factory smokestacks.

A nuanced portrait of a woman who was ahead of her times in more ways than one.