“I know so many people who feel hopeless, and they ask me, ‘What should I do?’ And I say: ‘Act. Do something.’ Because that is the best medicine against sadness and depression.”
—GRETA THUNBERG
Greta is part of a generation that has grown up seeing increasingly alarming news about the state of our planet. She has talked openly about her falling into a depression after learning about climate change at a young age. “I stopped talking. I stopped eating,” she has said. She couldn’t understand why everyone around her—from classmates to world leaders—wasn’t similarly fixated on confronting this global emergency. Then she decided to do something. She would later attribute her ability to focus so intensely on the issue in part to her Asperger’s syndrome. “I see the world a bit different, from another perspective,” she told New Yorker reporter Masha Gessen. “I have a special interest. It’s very common that people on the autism spectrum have a special interest.” Through activism, she found a purpose.
Greta’s urgency is justified. Just a few months after she first went on strike, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report warning the world that we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions in half before 2030 to avoid passing the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold that would be catastrophic. Ancient glaciers are breaking up, leading to an anticipated sea-level rise that has forced nations like Indonesia to explore relocating cities on the coasts because they’ll be underwater in fifty years. Villages in Alaska have already been moved. Scientists warn of thawing permafrost in Siberia leading to the release of more methane into the atmosphere and more warming from there, initiating devastating feedback loops. Destructive “hundred-year” floods, wildfires, and hurricanes have become regular events.
We often talk about tackling climate change as something we’re doing “for the planet.” Activists like Greta know that the planet will survive, but humans and life as we know it may not. That’s what we have to worry about, and urgently. As Greta has said: “I want you to behave like our house is on fire. Because it is.”
Greta was inspired to go down to the parliament building that day by the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and their activism around gun violence. She saw the Parkland students challenging adults to take long-awaited action on an issue that threatened their very lives, and she saw a parallel in her own growing anxiety about climate change. At first, she worried that the actions of one young girl couldn’t make a difference. She didn’t let her own doubts, or the ridicule she encountered from others, dissuade her. She was supported by her parents—actor Svante Thunberg and celebrated opera singer Malena Ernman, who travels to her performances by train and bicycle instead of flying in order to reduce her carbon footprint.
“We do need hope—of course we do. But the one thing we need more than hope is action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere.”
—GRETA THUNBERG
Just as the Parkland students inspired Greta, Greta has inspired young people all over the world to strike for climate action. That first day Greta packed her backpack, she was on her own. “I tried to bring people along to join me,” she said, “but no one was really interested, and so I had to do it by myself.” She went back to school after a few weeks but kept striking on Fridays in an ongoing protest she called #FridaysForFuture. Students across Europe and the world started joining—first just a few, then dozens, then hundreds, and now thousands. On March 15, 2019—a Friday, of course—1.6 million young people all over the world joined protest marches from Sydney to San Francisco and Kampala to Seoul. “The most common criticism I get is that I’m being manipulated and you shouldn’t use children in political ways,” Greta has said. “And I think that is so annoying! I’m also allowed to have a say—why shouldn’t I be able to form my own opinion and try to change people’s minds?”
CHELSEA
So many of the leaders in the global movement to confront climate change are gutsy women—from activists like Greta to women at the UN like Christiana Figueres and Patricia Espinosa, each of whom has served as executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Christiana assumed the position in 2010, just six months after global climate talks in Copenhagen failed to produce a consensus. Five years later, thanks in no small part to what she called her “stubborn optimism,” 195 countries came together in Paris and decided unanimously to “intentionally change the course of the global economy in order to protect the most vulnerable and improve people’s lives.” When Patricia took the helm in 2016, she helped widen the global conversation, including by launching an online effort that invites countries and nongovernmental organizations of all kinds to submit their own policy proposals to help achieve the Paris Agreement’s targets. I am also grateful that Greta is talking about a climate crisis, not climate change. Every day we don’t meet the commitments that Christiana helped negotiate and that Patricia is working to enforce, we are a day further from tackling our crisis and ensuring our planet is healthy and habitable for our children.
We face an immense challenge in making sure future generations can live and thrive on our planet. As a grandmother, mother, and human being, I’m personally invested in seeing climate action succeed. I’m grateful to Greta and all the young people who see a world in need of saving and have decided to act, individually and collectively, to save it. Talk about guts.
“Change is on the horizon,” Greta has said. “But to see that change we also have to change ourselves.” Let’s do it.
Explorers and Inventors
Caroline Herschel and Vera Rubin
CAROLINE HERSCHEL
VERA RUBIN
Chelsea
Caroline Herschel grew up in Hanover in present-day Germany, the eighth child of Isaac, an oboist, and his wife, Anna Ilse. When she was ten years old, in 1760, Caroline contracted typhus, a bacterial disease that can cause a terrible fever and rash and even be fatal. She made a full recovery, but she stopped growing. Her father had previously educated Caroline along with her brothers; that stopped after her illness. Her parents thought she would never marry because of her height—she was just over four feet tall, and they assumed that her small stature would inevitably lead her to a life of servitude.
But Caroline didn’t believe her parents’ predictions. When she was twenty-two, she left her native Germany to follow her older brother William to Bath, England. At the time, William was a composer, musician, and choral director. Caroline performed in his choir and kept house for her brother. In addition to music, William was also interested in astronomy and telescope design. Caroline assisted by experimenting with different types of lenses and optical tube lengths. When William discovered the planet Uranus, he was knighted and appointed court astronomer to King George III (yes, that King George III, from American history books and of Hamilton fame). William was the first person to discover a new planet in more than two thousand years. Suddenly, music became his hobby and astronomy his profession.
Caroline continued to help her brother with his experiments while pursuing her own studies in math and astronomy. William built larger, longer, and more powerful telescopes, often using lenses that Caroline had helped make in their laboratory next to the kitchen and the mirrors she had helped polish. In 1789, with Caroline’s help, William finished building what was then the largest telescope ever; it had a focal length of forty feet. It took four years to construct and stood intact for more than fifty.
While William got most of the credit for their joint efforts, ten years after moving to England, Caroline became her brother’s official apprentice. King George, recognizing her talent, began to support her career and work directly—likely the first time a woman was formally acknowledged by the British monarch for her scientific acumen. She proved herself to be more than deserving of such recognition.
On August 1, 1786, Caroline was looking through one of their telescopes when she noticed something moving across the sky: a never-before-identified comet. She saw it again the next nig
ht and alerted her brother and other fellow astronomers to its presence. Her brother deemed it, appropriately, “My Sister’s Comet.” Caroline is now known as the first woman ever to discover a comet. She would go on to discover eight in total.
Caroline was seventy-two years old when her brother died. After his death, she continued to record every observation she and her brother had made and noted the discrepancies between their work and the prevailing star catalogue of the time. Her “Catalogue of the Stars” was published in 1798. In 1828, the Royal Astronomical Society awarded her their Gold Medal for her work. No woman would be so honored again until 1996, almost 170 years later.
Caroline lived to be ninety-eight years old in an era when the average life expectancy for women was just fifty-five. Her astronomical maps are still in use today. When I learned that more than two decades ago, it astounded me—that someone could have so much clarity and vision that her work would help provide insight to scientists over two hundred years later.
More than eighty years after Caroline’s death and on a different continent, Vera Rubin fell in love with the night sky outside her childhood bedroom window. Her father helped her build her own telescope, and he accompanied her to amateur astronomers’ meetings. At her Vassar College graduation in 1948, she was the only graduating student who had majored in astronomy. After college, she hoped to enroll in graduate school at Princeton to continue her studies. She was told that Princeton didn’t admit women in the astronomy program, without exception—a policy that wouldn’t change until 1975.
“We have peered into a new world, and have seen that it is more mysterious and more complex than we had imagined. Still more mysteries of the universe remain hidden. Their discovery awaits the adventurous scientists of the future. I like it this way.”
—VERA RUBIN
Whenever I think of Vera and all the women who were kept out of higher education over the centuries because of the false conceit that only men belonged there, I hope those same colleges now realize what massive mistakes they made. Vera went on to Cornell and then Georgetown, completing her PhD in 1954 and providing research that proved the existence of galactic superclusters. These groups of smaller galaxy clusters are now believed to be some of the largest features of the known universe. At the time, her work was dismissed and derided; it would be decades before her findings were widely accepted.
When Vera started her doctoral work, she was pregnant with her second child. She encountered people, notably men, in her studies who openly doubted that a woman could take on such important scientific work and questioned whether a mother could possibly be committed to her studies at such a high level. The sexism didn’t stop when she moved into her own full-time teaching and then onto a more research-oriented career. In the 1960s, one observatory where Vera hoped to work had no women researchers and no facilities for women. So Vera stuck a paper skirt to the sign outside a men’s room, turning it into a women’s restroom. With one of their main objections to her presence now removed, they had no choice but to let her become the first woman to work there; her work had earned her that right. Still, as Vera acknowledged, it took her “a long time to believe I was a real astronomer.”
Vera continued to work on galaxy clusters and observed that their rotation curves defied predictions made according to contemporary theory. Narrowing her focus to single galaxies, she detected the same disconnect. The rotations of the galaxies were so swift, Vera hypothesized that gravity alone wasn’t sufficient to explain why they didn’t splinter apart. It was the first real evidence for dark matter, which scientist Fritz Zwicky had originally suggested after observing that galaxies seemed to be held together by something more than their own mass. Vera surmised that galaxies contain many times more dark matter than ordinary matter. Subsequent research would confirm her conclusions. We now know that dark matter accounts for 85 percent of the mass in the universe.
Vera didn’t just help us understand the cosmos; her work led to new fields of study and research and inspired generations of scientists. In 1996, she became the second woman, after Caroline Herschel, to receive the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. Vera is considered by many in her field to be one of the Nobel Prize’s most inexplicable misses. But that specific lack of affirmation for her work didn’t seem to bother her. The same force she had felt as a little girl observing the stars from her bedroom motivated her throughout her career: an insatiable desire to know more about the universe we live in. We know more about our universe today thanks to Vera and Caroline.
Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper
ADA LOVELACE
GRACE HOPPER
Chelsea
In 1987, Santa Claus gave me my first computer for Christmas. At that time, women made up more than a third of computer scientists in the United States. Today, it’s close to a quarter. That’s far from parity, especially in a field that women helped invent.
In the nineteenth century, Ada Lovelace did work that still echoes in the computers we use today. Ada’s parents, the poet Lord Byron, and his wife, Annabella, separated when she was a baby; she never saw her father again. Her mother supported her daughter’s interest in math, an unusual pursuit for women in the early 1800s, even those from families as privileged as Ada’s.
Starting as a teenager, Ada worked alongside Charles Babbage, the inventor of an automatic calculator known as the difference machine. She posited that a machine could follow rules, and that numbers could represent other concepts—like music notes or letters of the alphabet. She became the first person—man or woman—to imagine, or at least articulate, that a machine could generate music, not just perform calculations. Ada was also the first to publish an algorithm, or set of steps for solving a mathematical problem, intended for a machine’s use. For these reasons, she is often aptly described as the world’s first computer programmer and the “Prophet of the Computer Age.” It took guts to bring such unheard-of ideas into existence.
“I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand about the many connections and relations which occur to me.”
—ADA LOVELACE
Ada died of cancer at thirty-six. Who knows what else she might have imagined or invented had she lived longer. I learned about Ada in college, when I read Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia (a gift from Marc—then my friend, now my husband). Ada was the inspiration for Thomasina, the play’s most interesting character. I had always loved science—so how did I not know about the woman who helped lay the mathematical groundwork for computers? I should have learned about her in math class, or in my early computer classes. I hope students today learn about the remarkable woman who envisioned a computer’s possibilities long before the first one was invented.
When Grace Hopper was born almost one hundred years after Ada in New York City, mathematics continued to be dominated by men (as math and computer science still are today). Before she turned thirty, Grace had earned a PhD in mathematics, a rare achievement for anyone in 1934. First a professor of math at Vassar College, her alma mater, Grace joined the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II. She began working with the Mark I computer, becoming only the third person ever to program it. After the war, she continued working with computers in the private sector and in the navy, moving in and out of military service throughout her career.
HILLARY
I thought of Ada, Grace, and the many pioneering women in STEM when, in March 2019, U.S.-based mathematician Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck became the first woman to receive the prestigious Abel Prize. Among other things, she has explored the mathematics behind the formation of soap bubbles. She described the experience of being one of a small handful of women earning her PhD in math at Brandeis in 1968, writing: “We were told that we couldn’t do math because we were women. I liked doing what I wasn’t supposed to do, it was a sort of legitimate rebellion.” I love that phrase!
Like Ada, Grace imagined that comput
ers could do more than the complicated arithmetic they performed at the time. She used math to help create the first computer compiler, a program that translates words into numerical code, as Ada had once imagined. Her work led to the invention of programming languages. When she began working on proving that computers had more potential than anyone had conceived, she encountered significant cynicism and resistance, particularly from her male colleagues. She didn’t give up in the face of sexism; she pushed forward, tackling new frontiers in math. Grace once said, “If you do something once, people will call it an accident. If you do it twice, they call it a coincidence. But do it a third time and you’ve just proven a natural law!” For her contributions, propelled by her persistence and genius, she’s known today as the Mother of Computing.
I learned about Grace in 1996, when the navy named a new ship the U.S.S. Hopper in her honor, a rare instance of recognizing a woman in such a way. I learned even more about her when I spoke many years later at the Grace Hopper Celebration, the largest gathering of women technologists in the world. It still bothers me that, as with Ada, I never learned about Grace in school, particularly when we started working on computers in high school. We should have known that our work was made possible by Grace’s efforts during and after the war.
The Book of Gutsy Women Page 13