Elizabeth Ann Fox-Genovese (May 28, 1941 – January 2, 2007) was an American historian best known for her works on women and society in the
Antebellum South
In the history of the Southern United States, the Antebellum Period (from la, ante bellum, lit= before the war) spanned the end of the War of 1812 to the start of the American Civil War in 1861. The Antebellum South was characterized by ...
. 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
The National Humanities Medal is an American award that annually recognizes several individuals, groups, or institutions for work that has "deepened the nation's understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens' engagement with the huma ...
in 2003.
Biography
Elizabeth Ann Fox was born in
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
, Massachusetts. She was the daughter of
Cornell
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...
professor Edward Whiting Fox, a specialist in the history of
modern Europe
The history of Europe is traditionally divided into four time periods: prehistoric Europe (prior to about 800 BC), classical antiquity (800 BC to AD 500), the Middle Ages (AD 500 to AD 1500), and the modern era (since AD 1500).
The first ear ...
, and Elizabeth Mary (née Simon) Fox, whose brother was real estate mogul
Robert Simon. Her father was Protestant, of English, Scottish and Irish descent; her mother was Jewish, from a family that immigrated from Germany. Elizabeth Fox studied at the
Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris in France and attended
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College ( ; Welsh: ) is a women's liberal arts college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Founded as a Quaker institution in 1885, Bryn Mawr is one of the Seven Sister colleges, a group of elite, historically women's colleges in the United ...
. From Bryn Mawer College in 1963, she received a
BA in French and history. At
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...
, she earned a
Master's degree
A master's degree (from Latin ) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice. in history in 1966 and a PhD in 1974.
In 1969 she married fellow historian
Eugene D. Genovese and changed her surname to Fox-Genovese. They collaborated on some historical works in the course of their careers and had a professional partnership.
[Tribute to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese](_blank)
''Chronicle of Higher Education''. In the 1970s they founded the journal ''Marxist Perspectives,''
[ publishing the first issue in Spring 1978. Described as "brilliant but short-lived", it was published into the early 1980s. In 2012, in a partnership with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, '']Dissent
Dissent is an opinion, philosophy or sentiment of non-agreement or opposition to a prevailing idea or policy enforced under the authority of a government, political party or other entity or individual. A dissenting person may be referred to as ...
'' magazine
announced plans to digitize issues of the journal and make them available online.
After completing her PhD, Fox first taught at Binghamton University
The State University of New York at Binghamton (Binghamton University or SUNY Binghamton) is a public research university with campuses in Binghamton, Vestal, and Johnson City, New York. It is one of the four university centers in the Stat ...
and The University of Rochester. In 1986 she was recruited as founding director for the Institute for Women's Studies
Women's studies is an academic field that draws on feminist and interdisciplinary methods to place women's lives and experiences at the center of study, while examining social and cultural constructs of gender; systems of privilege and oppress ...
at Emory University
Emory University is a private research university in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 1836 as "Emory College" by the Methodist Episcopal Church and named in honor of Methodist bishop John Emory, Emory is the second-oldest private institution of ...
. At the Institute, she served as director and began the first doctoral
A doctorate (from Latin ''docere'', "to teach"), doctor's degree (from Latin ''doctor'', "teacher"), or doctoral degree is an academic degree awarded by universities and some other educational institutions, derived from the ancient formalism '' l ...
program in Women's Studies in the US; she personally directed thirty-two doctoral dissertations. She also taught history as the Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at t ...
.
In 1993 L. Virginia Gould, one of her former 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 were respectful of Christianity, but nonbelieving. For most of her adult life, she considered herself Christian only "in the amorphous cultural sense of the word." Having "thoroughly imbibed materialist
Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds matter to be the fundamental substance in nature, and all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions. According to philosophical materiali ...
philosophy," she inhabited "a world that took it as a matter of faith that ' God is dead'." In 1995, however, Fox-Genovese publicly converted
Conversion or convert may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media
* "Conversion" (''Doctor Who'' audio), an episode of the audio drama ''Cyberman''
* "Conversion" (''Stargate Atlantis''), an episode of the television series
* "The Conversion" ...
to Roman Catholicism
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...
, due in part to her deep unease about "moral relativism
Moral relativism or ethical relativism (often reformulated as relativist ethics or relativist morality) is used to describe several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different peoples and cultures. ...
" (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 the secular
Secularity, also the secular or secularness (from Latin ''saeculum'', "worldly" or "of a generation"), is the state of being unrelated or neutral in regards to religion. Anything that does not have an explicit reference to religion, either negativ ...
academy
An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosop ...
. 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"](_blank)
''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
Multiple (cerebral) sclerosis (MS), also known as encephalomyelitis disseminata or disseminated sclerosis, is the most common demyelinating disease, in which the insulating covers of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord are damaged. This ...
for 15 years. 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 in the United States before the American Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by Names of the American Civil War, other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union (American Civil War), Union ("the North") and t ...
. 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." 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."
This book received the following awards:
* 1988 C. Hugh Holman Award, Society for the Study of Southern Literature
* 1989 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, Southern Association for Women Historians
* 1989 Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America[''Within the Plantation Household''](_blank)
University of North Carolina Press.
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
Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...
history professor Sean Wilentz said, "She probably did more for the conservative women's movement than anyone... ervoice 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".[
]
Honors
* 2003, 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 FellowshipBiography of Fox-Genovese
at the Women's Studies Department], Emory University.
Selected writings
* .
* ''Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism,'' New York/ York:
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print book ...
, 1983. (with
Eugene D. Genovese)
* ''Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South'', series on Gender and American Culture, Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press
The University of North Carolina Press (or UNC Press), founded in 1922, is a university press that is part of the University of North Carolina. It was the first university press founded in the Southern United States. It is a member of the As ...
, 1988.
* ''Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism'', University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
* ''"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
''The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview''Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press in the world. It is also the King's Printer.
Cambridge University Pr ...
, 2005. (with
Eugene D. Genovese)
; Posthumous publications
* ''Marriage: The Dream that Refuses to Die'', Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008.
* ''Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders' New World Order'', Cambridge University Press, 2008. (with
Eugene D. Genovese
* (5 vols.)
References
Further reading
* (traduction from English original.)
* .
* .
External links
* .
* .
* .
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth
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
Roman Catholic writers
University of Rochester faculty
Women's historians
Writers from Boston
Historians from Massachusetts
Catholic feminists