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Elizabeth Ann Fox-Genovese ( Fox; May 28, 1941 – January 2, 2007) was an American historian best known for her works on women and society in the Antebellum South. A Marxist early on in her career, she later converted to Roman Catholicism and became a primary voice of the conservative women's movement. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2003.
In 1969, she married fellow historian Eugene D. Genovese. They collaborated on some historical works in the course of their careers and had a professional partnership. Tribute to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Chronicle of Higher Education. In the 1970s, they founded the journal Marxist Perspectives, publishing the first issue in Spring 1978. Marxist Perspectives, Vol.1, No.1 , The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, accessed June 14, 2014. Described as "brilliant but short-lived", it was published in the early 1980s. In 2012, in a partnership with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Dissent magazine
announced plans to digitize issues of the journal and make them available online. "'Marxist Perspectives' Revived", Dissent blog, April 18, 2012, accessed June 15, 2014.
After completing her Ph.D., Fox first taught at Binghamton University and the University of Rochester. In 1986, she was recruited as founding director for the Institute for Women's Studies at Emory University. At the Institute, she served as director and began the first doctorate program in Women's Studies in the US. She also taught history as the Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities.
In 1993, L. Virginia Gould, one of her graduate students, named Fox-Genovese and Emory University as co-defendants in a sexual discrimination and harassment lawsuit. Emory settled the lawsuit out of court. Financial details were not released..
Fox-Genovese grew up in a household of secular intellectuals who, while respectful of Christianity, were nonbelieving. For most of her adult life, she considered herself Christian only "in the amorphous cultural sense of the word." Having "thoroughly imbibed materialism philosophy," she inhabited "a world that took it as a matter of faith that 'God is dead'." In 1995, however, Fox-Genovese publicly converted to Catholicism, due in part to her deep unease about "moral relativism", since she found "a world in which each followed his or her moral compass" neither rational nor viable. She said she was also reacting to the pride and self-centeredness that she had witnessed in secularism academia. Some observers regarded her reputation as a feminist as being at odds with her conversion, but she found it to be "wholly consistent." "Elizabeth Fox-Genovese: Unorthodox scholar", The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 4, 2007. She wrote, "Sad as it may seem, my experience with radical, upscale feminism only reinforced my growing mistrust of individual pride."
Fox-Genovese died in 2007, aged 65, in Atlanta. She had lived with multiple sclerosis for 15 years. The following year, Eugene Genovese published a tribute to his wife, Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage..
This book received the following awards:
Fox-Genovese also wrote scholarly and popular works on feminism. Through her writings, she alienated many feminists but attracted many women who may have considered themselves conservative feminists. Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz said, "She probably did more for the conservative women's movement than anyone... Her voice came from inside the academy and updated the ideas of the conservative women's movement. She was one of their most influential intellectual forces." Fox-Genovese reportedly had no patience with the cultural feminist trend of viewing women and men as possessing completely different values, and she criticized the idea that women's natural instincts and experience of oppression gave them a superior capacity for justice and mercy. For this, she had been labeled by Cathy Young as an "antifeminist".
Scholarship
Fox-Genovese's academic interests changed from French history to the history of women in the United States before the American Civil War. Virginia Shadron, assistant dean at Emory, later said that Fox-Genovese's Within the Plantation Household (1988) cemented her reputation as a scholar of women in the Old South. Contemporary reviews praised it; one described her work as bridging "the gap between the study of individual identity and the economic and social milieu." David Weiman, Review: "'Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South', by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese", The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Sep. 1990), pp. 759–61, Published by: Cambridge University Press, accessed June 16, 2014. Mechal Sobel of The New York Times wrote, "Elizabeth Fox-Genovese undertakes the enormous tasks of telling the life stories of the last generation of black and white women of the Old South, and of analyzing the meanings of these connected stories as a way of illuminating both Southern and women's history—tasks at which she succeeds brilliantly."
Honors
Selected writings
Further reading
External links
Categories: 1941 Births, 2007 Deaths, 20th-century American Historians, 20th-century American Women Writers, 21st-century American Historians, 21st-century American Women Writers, American Feminist Writers, American People Of English Descent, American People Of Irish Descent, American People Of German-jewish Descent, American People Of Scottish Descent, American Women Historians, Binghamton University Faculty, Bryn Mawr College Alumni, Catholics From Massachusetts, Converts To Roman Catholicism From Atheism Or Agnosticism, Emory University Faculty, Female Critics Of Feminism, Feminist Historians, Harvard Graduate School Of Arts And Sciences Alumni, Historians Of Slavery, Historians Of The Southern United States, Individualist Feminists, National Humanities Medal Recipients, American Roman Catholic Writers, University Of Rochester Faculty, Women's Historians, Writers From Boston, Historians From Massachusetts, Catholic Feminists
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