Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
Encyclopedia
Elizabeth Ann Fox-Genovese (May 28, 1941, Boston
– January 2, 2007, Atlanta) was a feminist (and later, in the view of some, antifeminist) American
historian
particularly known for her writing about women in the Antebellum South. She was also a primary voice of the conservative
women's movement.
professor Edward Whiting Fox, a specialist in the history of modern Europe, and Elizabeth Simon Fox, daughter of real estate mogul Robert Simon, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese studied at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris
in France and attended Bryn Mawr College
, where in 1963 she received a B.A.
in French and history. At Harvard University
, she earned a M.A.
in history in 1966 and a Ph.D.
in 1974. After completing her PhD she taught at Binghamton University
and The University of Rochester. In 1986 she began teaching history at Emory University
, where she was the Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities
and the founding director of the Institute for Women's Studies
. At the Institute, she began the first doctoral
program in Women's Studies in the U.S. and personally directed thirty-two doctoral dissertations. She was married to and sometimes collaborated with fellow historian and husband Eugene D. Genovese
.
In 1993 Fox-Genovese and Emory University were named as co-defendants in a sexual discrimination and harassment lawsuit filed by L. Virginia Gould, one of her former graduate students. Emory settled the lawsuit out of court. Financial details were not released.
Fox-Genovese grew up in a household that was respectful of Christianity
but nonbelieving, and for most of her adult life considered herself Christian only "in the amorphous cultural sense of the word". Having "thoroughly imbibed materialist
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 Roman 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) and in part to the pride and self-centeredness that she said she had witnessed in the secular
academy
. Some regarded her reputation as a feminist as being at odds with her conversion, but she herself found it to be "wholly consistent" and 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. The following year, Eugene Genovese published a tribute to his wife, Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage.
. Virginia Shadron, assistant dean at Emory, said that Within the Plantation Household cemented the reputation of Fox-Genovese as a scholar of women in the Old South
.
Fox-Genovese also wrote scholarly and popular works on feminism itself. Through her writings, she alienated many feminists but attracted many woman 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.
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
– January 2, 2007, Atlanta) was a feminist (and later, in the view of some, antifeminist) American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
particularly known for her writing about women in the Antebellum South. She was also a primary voice of the conservative
Social conservatism
Social Conservatism is primarily a political, and usually morally influenced, ideology that focuses on the preservation of what are seen as traditional values. Social conservatism is a form of authoritarianism often associated with the position that the federal government should have a greater role...
women's movement.
Biography
The daughter of CornellCornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
professor Edward Whiting Fox, a specialist in the history of modern Europe, and Elizabeth Simon Fox, daughter of real estate mogul Robert Simon, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese studied at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris
Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris
The Institut d'études politiques de Paris , simply referred to as Sciences Po , is a public research and higher education institution in Paris, France, specialised in the social sciences. It has the status of grand établissement, which allows its admissions process to be highly selective...
in France and attended Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College is a women's liberal arts college located in Bryn Mawr, a community in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Philadelphia. The name "Bryn Mawr" means "big hill" in Welsh....
, where in 1963 she received a B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
in French and history. At Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, she earned a M.A.
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
in history in 1966 and a Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
in 1974. After completing her PhD she taught at Binghamton University
Binghamton University
Binghamton University, also formally called State University of New York at Binghamton, , is a public research university in the State of New York. The University is one of the four university centers in the State University of New York system...
and The University of Rochester. In 1986 she began teaching history at Emory University
Emory University
Emory University is a private research university in metropolitan Atlanta, located in the Druid Hills section of unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, United States. The university was founded as Emory College in 1836 in Oxford, Georgia by a small group of Methodists and was named in honor of...
, where she was the Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities
Humanities
The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....
and the founding director of the Institute for Women's Studies
Women's studies
Women's studies, also known as feminist studies, is an interdisciplinary academic field which explores politics, society and history from an intersectional, multicultural women's perspective...
. At the Institute, she began the first doctoral
Doctorate
A doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder to teach in a specific field, A doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder...
program in Women's Studies in the U.S. and personally directed thirty-two doctoral dissertations. She was married to and sometimes collaborated with fellow historian and husband Eugene D. Genovese
Eugene D. Genovese
Eugene Dominic Genovese is an American historian of the American South and American slavery. He has been noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and slaves in the South. His work Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won the...
.
In 1993 Fox-Genovese and Emory University were named as co-defendants in a sexual discrimination and harassment lawsuit filed by L. Virginia Gould, one of her former graduate students. Emory settled the lawsuit out of court. Financial details were not released.
Fox-Genovese grew up in a household that was respectful of Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
but nonbelieving, and for most of her adult life considered herself Christian only "in the amorphous cultural sense of the word". Having "thoroughly imbibed materialist
Materialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
philosophy," she inhabited "a world that took it as a matter of faith that 'God is dead
God is dead
"God is dead" is a widely-quoted statement by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It first appears in The Gay Science , in sections 108 , 125 , and for a third time in section 343...
'." In 1995, however, Fox-Genovese publicly converted
Religious conversion
Religious conversion is the adoption of a new religion that differs from the convert's previous religion. Changing from one denomination to another within the same religion is usually described as reaffiliation rather than conversion.People convert to a different religion for various reasons,...
to Roman Catholicism, due in part to her deep unease about "moral relativism
Moral relativism
Moral relativism may be any of several descriptive, meta-ethical, or normative positions. Each of them is concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different people and cultures:...
" (since she found "a world in which each followed his or her moral compass" neither rational nor viable) and in part to the pride and self-centeredness that she said she had witnessed in the secular
Secularism
Secularism is the principle of separation between government institutions and the persons mandated to represent the State from religious institutions and religious dignitaries...
academy
Academia
Academia is the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.-Etymology:The word comes from the akademeia in ancient Greece. Outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning...
. Some regarded her reputation as a feminist as being at odds with her conversion, but she herself found it to be "wholly consistent" and 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. The following year, Eugene Genovese published a tribute to his wife, Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage.
Scholarship
Fox-Genovese's academic interests changed from French history to the history of women before the American Civil WarAmerican Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
. Virginia Shadron, assistant dean at Emory, said that Within the Plantation Household cemented the reputation of Fox-Genovese as a scholar of women in the Old South
Old South
Geographically, Old South is a subregion of the American South, differentiated from the "Deep South" as being the Southern States represented in the original thirteen American colonies, as well as a way of describing the former lifestyle in the Southern United States. Culturally, the term can be...
.
Fox-Genovese also wrote scholarly and popular works on feminism itself. Through her writings, she alienated many feminists but attracted many woman who may have considered themselves conservative feminists. Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
history professor Sean Wilentz
Sean Wilentz
Robert Sean Wilentz is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor of History at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1979.-Background:Born in 1951 in New York City, where his father Eli and uncle Ted owned a well-known Greenwich Village bookstore, the Eighth Street Bookshop, Wilentz earned...
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.
Honors
- National Humanities Medal
- Cardinal Wright Award from the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars
- Doctor of Letters from Millsaps College
- C. Hugh Holman Prize from the Society for Southern Literature
- ACLS & Ford Foundation Fellowship
Selected writings
- The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-century France, Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1976. ISBN 978-0801410062
- Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism with Eugene D. Genovese, New York York: Oxford University Press, 1983. ISBN 978-0195031577
- Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South, series on Gender and American Culture, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. ISBN 978-0807842324
- Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism, University of North Carolina Press, 1991. ISBN 978-0807843727
- "Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life": How Today's Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women, Anchor reprint, 1996 ISBN 978-0385467919
- Marriage: The Dream that Refuses to Die, Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008. ISBN 978-1933859620
- The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview with Eugene D. Genovese, Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0521615624
- Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders' New World Order, with Eugene D. Genovese, Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0521897006
Further reading
- Donna Steichen (ed.), Conversos. 12 testimonios recientes. Madrid: Rialp, 2011, pp. 60-80. (Spanish traduction from English original.)
- Eugene D. Genovese, Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage, Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008. ISBN 978-1935191018
- David Raney, «Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, 1941-2007», Emory Quadrangle (Atlanta, Georgia). Fall 2007, pp. 4-5.
External links
- Inventory of the Elizabeth Fox-Genovese Papers, 1966-2007, UNC-Chapel HillUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillThe University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States...
- Biography of Fox-Genovese at the Women's Studies Department at Emory
- Obituary of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese at the New York Times
- Obituary of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese at the National ReviewNational ReviewNational Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...