Science Archives - Page 173 of 189

Leilah Gordon

In 1917 Leilah Gordon was appointed visiting nurse, under the Infant Life Protection Act 1907. In 1920, under the same act, she was appointed district agent for Otago. She was one of four officers appointed to each of the main centres. All children under six in Otago living with adults other than their parents were visited by her every few months. Most of these children were illegitimate and in poor health when they came into care. The mortality rate for illegitimate infants in the 1920s in New Zealand was high. But as a result of welfare intervention, among the hundreds of infants up to six years old living in foster care in Otago there were only three deaths between 1917 and 1926.

Marie Mildred Clay

Marie Clay was an influential literacy researcher and educationalist whose pioneering Reading Recovery programme changed the experience of learning to read for many children in many countries.

Martha King

Martha King was New Zealand’s first resident botanical artist.

Hester Maclean

She was largely responsible for drafting the Nurses and Midwives Registration Act 1925, which gave nurses a more direct role in nursing administration.

Eileen Fairbairn

She is remembered for pioneering the teaching of modern geography in New Zealand secondary schools.

Mary Isabel Lambie

Her innovation helped shape the future of New Zealand nursing.

Eva Gertrude Brooke

Eva Brooke was a quiet, serious-minded woman, a patriotic nurse respected by both her staff and the doctors with whom she worked during World War I.

Sarah Dougherty

Sarah Dougherty was typical of many women of her time. That this small, auburn-haired woman had great physical and mental strength is borne out by her survival to a great age. Self-taught, a ‘well-informed woman,’ extraordinarily independent, she endured hardship, risk and isolation.

Alice Everett

Alice Everett was a mathematician and astronomer who studied the mathematical tripos at Girton College, worked at the Royal Observatory Greenwich and then at the Potsdam Astrophysical Observatory. She had a second career working on optics at the National Physical Laboratory. Her final career was working on the early developments of television broadcasting.

Alice Lee

Alice Lee was awarded a D.Sc. in 1899, and had an outstanding career as a statistician working in both Bedford College and University College in London. Her work was important in disproving the belief that skull size was related to intelligence, the argument that was being used at that time to “prove” women were intellectually inferior to men.