{{Short description|American historian (1941–2007)}} {{Use mdy dates|date=July 2015}} {{Infobox person |name=Elizabeth Fox-Genovese |image=Elizabeth Fox-Genovese 2003.jpg |caption=Fox-Genovese in 2003 |birth_name=Elizabeth Ann Fox |birth_date=May 28, 1941 |birth_place=Boston, Massachusetts, US |alma_mater={{unbulleted list|Bryn Mawr College (BA)|Harvard University (MA, PhD)}} |death_date={{death date and age|2007|1|2|1941|5|28}} |death_place=Atlanta, Georgia, US |occupation=Historian, writer |spouse={{marriage|Eugene Genovese|1969}} |relatives={{unbulleted list|Rebecca MacMillan Fox (sister)|Robert E. Simon (uncle)}} }}
'''Elizabeth Ann Fox-Genovese''' ({{née}} '''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.
==Biography== Elizabeth Ann Fox was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She was the daughter of Cornell professor Edward Whiting Fox, a specialist in the history of modern Europe, and Elizabeth Mary ({{née|Simon}}) Fox, whose brother was real estate mogul Robert E. Simon.<ref>{{Citation | url = http://search.lib.unc.edu/search?R=UNCb5334468 | title = Fox and Simon Family Papers, 1862–1991 | publisher = UNC| year = 1862 | last1 = Family | first1 = Fox | last2 = Family | first2 = Simon }}.</ref> Her father was Protestant, of English, Scottish, and Irish descent; her mother was Jewish, from a family that immigrated from Germany.<ref>{{Citation | url = http://www.christendomreview.com/Volume001Issue002/douglas_ambrose_01.html | journal = Christendom Review | title = Douglas Ambrose | volume = 1 | issue = 2}}.</ref> Elizabeth Fox studied at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris in France and attended Bryn Mawr College. From Bryn Mawr College in 1963, she received a BA in French and history.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/national-humanities-medals/elizabeth-fox-genovese|title=Elizabeth Fox-Genovese|work=National Endowment for the Humanities|access-date=13 May 2022}}</ref> At Harvard University, she earned a Master's degree in history in 1966 and a Ph.D. in 1974.
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.<ref name="tribute">[http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2012/09/28/on-eugene-genovese/ Tribute to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese], ''Chronicle of Higher Education''.</ref> In the 1970s, they founded the journal ''Marxist Perspectives'',<ref name=NYTobit/> publishing the first issue in Spring 1978.<ref>[http://thebrooklyninstitute.com/archive-library/book-2/ ''Marxist Perspectives'', Vol.1, No.1] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140714161820/http://thebrooklyninstitute.com/archive-library/book-2/ |date=July 14, 2014 }}, The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, accessed June 14, 2014.</ref> 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.<ref>[http://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/marxist-perspectives-revived "'Marxist Perspectives' Revived"], ''Dissent'' blog, April 18, 2012, accessed June 15, 2014.</ref>
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 doctoral program in Women's Studies in the US. She also taught history as the Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities.<ref name = "Obit"/>
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.<ref name=NYTobit>{{Citation | last = Margalit | first = Fox | url = https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/arts/07fox-genovese.html | title = Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, historian, Is Dead at 65 | newspaper = The New York Times | date = January 7, 2007}}.</ref>
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 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 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 secular academia.<ref name= "Conversion">{{cite journal | url = http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=2597&var_recherche=Elizabeth+Fox-Genovese | title = A Conversion Story | first = Elizabeth | last = Fox–Genovese | journal = First Things | issue = 102 | date = April 2000 | pages = 39–43 | access-date = 2009-05-11 | archive-date = March 20, 2008 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20080320104451/http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=2597&var_recherche=elizabeth%20fox-genovese | url-status = dead }}</ref> Some observers regarded her reputation as a feminist as being at odds with her conversion, but she found it to be "wholly consistent."<ref name = "Obit">[http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/33650.html "Elizabeth Fox-Genovese: Unorthodox scholar"], ''The Atlanta Journal-Constitution'', January 4, 2007.</ref> She wrote, "Sad as it may seem, my experience with radical, upscale feminism only reinforced my growing mistrust of individual pride."<ref name="Conversion"/>
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''.<ref>{{Citation |title = Voices; Vol. XXIV, No. 2 |edition = online |chapter = 3. Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage; Nature and Grace |chapter-url = http://wf-f.org/09-02-Genovese.html |last = Genovese |first = Eugene |publisher = WF-F |year = 2009 |url-status = dead |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20100624103535/http://wf-f.org/09-02-Genovese.html |archive-date = June 24, 2010 |df = mdy-all }}.</ref>
==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.<ref name="Obit"/> Contemporary reviews praised it; one described her work as bridging "the gap between the study of individual identity and the economic and social milieu."<ref>[https://www.jstor.org/stable/2122860 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.</ref> 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."<ref name="UNC"/>
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<ref name="UNC">[http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=507 ''Within the Plantation Household''] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140822234047/http://www.uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=507 |date=August 22, 2014 }}, University of North Carolina Press.</ref>
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."<ref name="Obit"/> 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.<ref name="Young2007"/> For this, she had been labeled by Cathy Young as an "antifeminist".<ref name="Young2007"> {{cite news |url=http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/01/08/the_evolution_of_an_antifeminist/ |title=The Evolution of an Antifeminist |author=Cathy Young |work=The Boston Globe |date=January 8, 2007 |access-date=2008-04-18}}</ref>
==Honors== * 2003, National Humanities Medal<ref name="Obit"/> * 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<ref>[http://www.womensstudies.emory.edu/facstaff/faculty_foxgenovese.shtml Biography of Fox-Genovese] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060910080439/http://www.womensstudies.emory.edu/facstaff/faculty_foxgenovese.shtml |date=September 10, 2006 }} at the Women's Studies Department], Emory University.</ref>
==Selected writings== * {{Citation | title = The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-century France | place = Ithaca | publisher = Cornell University Press | year = 1976 | isbn = 978-0-8014-1006-2}}. * ''Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism,'' New York/ York: Oxford University Press, 1983. {{ISBN|978-0-19-503157-7}} (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, 1988. {{ISBN|978-0-8078-4232-4}} * ''Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism'', University of North Carolina Press, 1991. {{ISBN|978-0-8078-4372-7}} * ''"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|978-0-385-46791-9}} * [https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Mind_of_the_Master_Class.html?id=J105LInsog0C ''The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview''] Cambridge University Press, 2005. {{ISBN|978-0-521-61562-4}} (with Eugene D. Genovese) ; Posthumous publications * ''Marriage: The Dream that Refuses to Die'', Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008. {{ISBN|978-1-933859-62-0}} * ''Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders' New World Order'', Cambridge University Press, 2008. {{ISBN|978-0-521-89700-6}} (with Eugene D. Genovese * {{Citation | title = History and Women, Culture and Faith: Selected Writings | publisher = University of South Carolina Press | year = 2011}} (5 vols.)
==References== {{reflist}}
== Further reading == * {{Citation | editor-first = Donna | editor-last = Steichen | title = Conversos. 12 testimonios recientes | place = Madrid | publisher = Rialp | year = 2011 | pages = 60–80 | language = es}} (traduction from English original.) * {{Citation | first = Eugene D | last = Genovese | title = Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage | place = Wilmington, DE, US | publisher = ISI Books | year = 2008 | isbn = 978-1-935191-01-8}}. * {{Citation | first = David | last = Raney | title = Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, 1941–2007; Fall 2007 | journal = Emory Quadrangle | place = Atlanta, Georgia | pages = 4–5}}.
==External links== * {{Citation | url = http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/f/Fox-Genovese,Elizabeth.html | title = Inventory of the Elizabeth Fox-Genovese Papers, 1966–2007 | publisher = UNC | place = Chapel Hill, NC, USA}}. * {{Citation | url = http://www.womensstudies.emory.edu/facstaff/faculty_foxgenovese.shtml | type = biography | title = Fox-Genovese | publisher = Women's Studies Department at Emory | access-date = January 5, 2007 | archive-date = September 10, 2006 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20060910080439/http://www.womensstudies.emory.edu/facstaff/faculty_foxgenovese.shtml | url-status = dead }}. * {{Citation|url=http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2U0NzViMDdmZmViYjVlYjc2NTY0MzRkYjJlYzQzNDI= |type=obituary |title=Elizabeth Fox-Genovese |journal=National Review |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070115174839/http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2U0NzViMDdmZmViYjVlYjc2NTY0MzRkYjJlYzQzNDI= |archive-date=January 15, 2007 |df=mdy }}. * {{C-SPAN|42228}}
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth}} Category:1941 births Category:2007 deaths Category:20th-century American historians Category:20th-century American women writers Category:21st-century American historians Category:21st-century American women writers Category:American former atheists and agnostics Category:American feminist writers Category:American people of Irish descent Category:American people of German-Jewish descent Category:American women historians Category:Binghamton University faculty Category:Bryn Mawr College alumni Category:Catholics from Massachusetts Category:Converts to Roman Catholicism from atheism or agnosticism Category:Emory University faculty Category:Female critics of feminism Category:Critics of feminism Category:Feminist historians Category:Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Category:Historians of slavery Category:Historians of the Southern United States Category:Individualist feminists Category:National Humanities Medal recipients Category:American Roman Catholic writers Category:University of Rochester faculty Category:Women's historians Category:Writers from Boston Category:Historians from Massachusetts Category:Catholic feminists Category:American people of English descent