In celebration of all the women scientists in Aotearoa New Zealand, this stamp issue highlights the remarkable work of four trailblazing women Mākereti Papakura, Lucy Moore, Joan Wiffen and Beatrice Hill Tinsley achieved in the scientific fields of ethnography, botany, palaeontology and cosmology in the 20th century.
Issue information
Born between 1873 and 1941, the women featured on these stamps achieved in the face of institutional and societal structures that often made things difficult for women.
Mākereti Papakura drew on her whānau and consulted hapū elders to collate years of letters, notebooks and sketches that provided insights into the lives of Māori women, who were often ignored or undervalued by men writing about Māori society. New Zealand’s main science employer, the DSIR, did not employ any women as scientists until the late 1930s, when Lucy Moore was finally able to secure permanent work more than 10 years after her graduation.
Many other women worked as unpaid research assistants to their scientist fathers or husbands, and their contributions were often not acknowledged. Even in the 1980s, when she made most of her discoveries, Joan Wiffen had trouble being taken seriously by the country’s almost exclusively male geology workforce. When Beatrice Hill Tinsley followed her husband to the United States, she shouldered the bulk of the housework and childcare responsibilities, and nepotism rules prevented her getting a job at the same university as him.
With lives that spanned the course of the 20th century, these women scientists were trailblazers, setting out on careers of discovery and achievement in spite of the barriers they faced.
Product listing for Woman in Science
| Image | Title | Description | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
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Single Stamp |
Single $1.70 'Lucy Moore (1906-1987) botanist and ecologist' gummed stamp. This stamp depicts Lucy Moore with images of Pterocladia lucida, one of the seaweeds she observed and described. In her long career she was responsible for the taxonomy of a variety of native flora. Lucy B. Moore, Plate 46, The Genus Pterocladia in New Zealand, Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Volume 74, 1944-45, p. 336. |
$1.70 |
 |
Single Stamp |
Single $3.00 'Joan Wiffen (1922-2009) palaeontologist' gummed stamp. Joan Wiffen was a self-taught palaeontologist who, in 1975, discovered Aotearoa’s first dinosaur bone, a tail bone from a theropod, in Mangahouanga Stream in Hawke’s Bay. J. Wiffen (1990) New mosasaurs (Reptilia; Family Mosasauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous of North Island, New Zealand, New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics, 33:1, 67-85, DOI: 10.1080/00288306.1990.10427574
|
$3.00 |
 |
Single Stamp |
Single $3.80 'Beatrice Hill Tinsley (1941-1981) astrophysicist' gummed stamp. In her short but remarkable career Beatrice Hill Tinsley proved that the universe was infinite and would expand forever, and that galaxies evolved and interacted. This picture shows Hill Tinsley in her office at Yale University in 1975.
|
$3.80 |
 |
Single Stamp |
Single $4.30 'Mākereti Papakura (1873-1930) (Tūhourangi), leader, guide, ethnographer' gummed stamp. Mākereti Papakura was an anthropologist whose posthumously published work, The Old-Time Māori (1938), is now widely acknowledged as the first published scholarly work of ethnography written by a Māori scholar.
|
$4.30 |
 |
Miniature Sheet |
Mint, used or cancelled miniature sheet. |
$12.80 |
 |
First Day Cover |
First day cover with four gummed stamp affixed. Cancelled on the first day of issue. |
$13.30 |
 |
Miniature Sheet First Day Cover |
First day cover with gummed miniature sheet affixed. Cancelled on the first day of issue. |
$13.30 |
 |
Presentation Pack |
You could learn more about the work of the trailblazing scientists who paved the way for the women who followed them. Along with the details of each woman’s life and achievements, the presentation pack included a set of four stamps, a miniature sheet and a first day cover. |
$35.50 |
Technical information
| Date of issue: | 2 November 2022 |
|---|---|
| Number of stamps: | Four gummed stamps |
| Denominations: | $1.70, $3.00, $3.80 & $4.30 |
| Designed and illustrated by: | Jo Bailey, Wellington, New Zealand |
| Printer and process: | Southern Colour Print, New Zealand by lithography |
| Number of colours: | Four process colours |
| Stamp size and format: | 28mm x 35.16mm (vertical) |
| Miniature sheet size and format: | 128mm x 90mm (horizontal) |
| Paper type: | Arconvert securpost premium gummed 110gsm |
| Number of stamps per sheet: | 20 |
| Perforation gauge: | 13.50 x 13.75 |
| Special blocks: | Plate/imprint blocks could be obtained by purchasing at least six stamps from a sheet. Barcode blocks were available in A and B formats. |
| Period of sale: | These stamps remained on sale until 1 November 2023. The first day cover remained on sale until 28 December 2022. |
