Margie R Ripper

Margie’s central research interest in gender and the body led to her first class Honours Degree from Flinders University in 1978 (The history of the Birth Control Movement in Australia) and then extended to her PhD from Flinders University in 1991 which explored the gender constructions of hormones and menstrual cycle ‘disorders’.

Margie came to Women’s Studies at the University of Adelaide in 1992 from Flinders University where she had taught in some of the earliest Women’s Studies courses (1978-1981).  Margie wrote (along with Lyndall Ryan and Barbara Buttfield) We Women Decide (1994), a major research report on abortion policy, law and experience in Australia.  In 2002 she was awarded the Governor General’s Centennial Medal for services to the Australian community in the area of education.

Since retiring from academia Margie has continued her activism for abortion and reproductive rights, alongside her new career as a landscape designer.