Margaret S. Marsh

Margaret Marsh has been dean of the Rutgers–Camden Faculty of Arts and Sciences since 1998. She earned a bachelor of arts degree at Camden College of Arts and Sciences, then completed her Ph.D. in history at the Graduate School–New Brunswick. Marsh is internationally renowned for her expertise in the fields of women’s and gender history, American cultural history, and the connections between gender and medicine. In addition to her responsibilities as dean, Marsh is also a Distinguished Professor of History, teaching both undergraduate and graduate students. Marsh’s scholarship has ranged broadly across the American past. Her first book, Anarchist Women (1981), explored the challenges to authority and convention posed by women who embraced anarchism. Marsh focused on how these women contested gender ideology through their lives, work, and beliefs. In Suburban Lives (1990), she explained what life in the suburbs meant to those who lived there. She examined not only the physical space of the suburbs but also the social, cultural, and economic experiences of the families who lived there. In the 1990s, Marsh’s research took a different turn, as she paired with her sister Wanda Ronner CCAS’74, a distinguished gynecologist and obstetrician, to write The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present (1996). This work considered infertility as not only an individual problem but also a cultural and medical phenomenon. In 2008, Marsh and Ronner continued their partnership and published The Fertility Doctor: John Rock and the Reproductive Revolution. Based principally on materials previously unavailable to scholars, this book is a cultural and intellectual biography of Rock, the leading researcher-practitioner in reproductive medicine in the first half of the 20th century. Rock is perhaps best known as the “father” of the birth-control pill. Marsh received a grant from the Research Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund this project.