Elizabeth Fox-Genovese facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
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Fox-Genovese in 2003
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Elizabeth Ann Fox
May 28, 1941 Boston, Massachusetts, US
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| Died | January 2, 2007 (aged 65) Atlanta, Georgia, US
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| Occupation | Historian, writer |
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| Family | Robert E. Simon (uncle) |
Elizabeth Ann Fox-Genovese (born May 28, 1941 – died January 2, 2007) was an American historian. She was famous for her studies on women and society in the Antebellum South (the time before the American Civil War). Early in her career, she followed ideas from Karl Marx about society and economics. Later, she became a Catholic and was an important voice for the conservative women's movement. In 2003, she received the National Humanities Medal, a special award for people who have done great work in the humanities.
Contents
Her Life Story
Elizabeth Ann Fox was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father, Edward Whiting Fox, was a professor at Cornell University who studied modern European history. Her mother, Elizabeth Mary Fox, was Jewish, and her family had moved from Germany. Elizabeth's uncle was a well-known real estate developer named Robert E. Simon.
Elizabeth studied in France at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. She then went to Bryn Mawr College, where she earned a degree in French and history in 1963. She continued her studies at Harvard University, getting a master's degree in history in 1966 and a Ph.D. (a very high degree) in 1974.
In 1969, she married Eugene D. Genovese, who was also a historian. They often worked together on historical projects. In the 1970s, they started a journal called Marxist Perspectives, which published its first issue in 1978. It was a respected journal, though it didn't last many years.
Her Teaching Career
After finishing her Ph.D., Elizabeth Fox-Genovese taught at Binghamton University and the University of Rochester. In 1986, she was asked to help start the Institute for Women's Studies at Emory University. At Emory, she became the director and created the first Ph.D. program in Women's Studies in the United States. She personally guided 32 students through their doctoral projects. She also taught history as a special professor of the Humanities.
Her Religious Conversion
Elizabeth grew up in a family of thinkers who didn't follow a religion, even though they respected Christianity. For most of her life, she didn't consider herself religious. However, in 1995, she publicly became a Catholic. One reason for this change was her concern about "moral relativism"—the idea that there is no absolute right or wrong. She felt that a world where everyone followed their own moral rules wasn't logical or practical. She also felt that some parts of the non-religious academic world were too focused on individual pride. She believed her conversion fit well with her views on feminism, saying that her experiences with some extreme feminist ideas made her trust individual pride less.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese passed away in 2007 in Atlanta when she was 65 years old. She had been living with multiple sclerosis, a long-term illness, for 15 years. The year after she died, her husband, Eugene Genovese, wrote a book about their marriage called Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage.
Her Important Studies
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's main academic focus shifted from French history to the history of women in the United States before the American Civil War. Her book, Within the Plantation Household (published in 1988), made her very well-known as a scholar of women in the Old South. Experts praised the book, saying it helped connect the stories of individual people with the larger economic and social world. Mechal Sobel from The New York Times said that Fox-Genovese did a brilliant job telling the life stories of black and white women from the Old South and explaining what those stories meant for both Southern history and women's history.
This book won several 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
Fox-Genovese also wrote about feminism (the movement for equal rights for women). Her writings sometimes made other feminists disagree with her, but she attracted many women who saw themselves as conservative feminists. Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton University, said she was one of the most important thinkers for the conservative women's movement. Fox-Genovese didn't like the idea that women and men have completely different values. She also criticized the belief that women's natural feelings or experiences of unfairness made them better at understanding justice or mercy. Because of these views, some people called her an "antifeminist".
Awards and 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 Fellowship
Selected Books
- 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
- 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)
- Books published after her death
- 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)
- (5 vols.)
See also
In Spanish: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese para niños
