Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

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Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
Fox-Genovese in 2003
Born
Elizabeth Ann Fox

May 28, 1941
Boston, Massachusetts, US
DiedJanuary 2, 2007(2007-01-02) (aged 65)
Atlanta, Georgia, US
Alma mater
Occupation(s)Historian, writer
Spouse
(m. 1969)
FamilyRobert E. Simon (uncle)

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. 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

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.[4] In the 1970s, they founded the journal Marxist Perspectives,[5] publishing the first issue in Spring 1978.[6] 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
magazine announced plans to digitize issues of the journal and make them available online.[7]

After completing her Ph.D., Fox first taught at

dissertations. She also taught history as the Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities.[8]

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.[5]

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

academia.[9] Some observers regarded her reputation as a feminist as being at odds with her conversion, but she found it to be "wholly consistent."[8] She wrote, "Sad as it may seem, my experience with radical, upscale feminism only reinforced my growing mistrust of individual pride."[9]

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.[10]

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.[8] Contemporary reviews praised it; one described her work as bridging "the gap between the study of individual identity and the economic and social milieu."[11] 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."[12]

This book received the following awards:

Fox-Genovese also wrote scholarly and popular works on feminism. Through her writings, she alienated many

antifeminist".[13]

Honors

  • 2003, National Humanities Medal[8]
  • 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[14]

Selected writings

Posthumous publications

References

  1. ^ Fox and Simon Family Papers, 1862–1991, UNC, 1862.
  2. ^ "Douglas Ambrose", Christendom Review, 1 (2).
  3. ^ "Elizabeth Fox-Genovese". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved May 13, 2022.
  4. ^ Tribute to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Chronicle of Higher Education.
  5. ^ a b Margalit, Fox (January 7, 2007), "Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, historian, Is Dead at 65", The New York Times.
  6. ^ Marxist Perspectives, Vol.1, No.1 Archived July 14, 2014, at the Wayback Machine, The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, accessed June 14, 2014.
  7. ^ "'Marxist Perspectives' Revived", Dissent blog, April 18, 2012, accessed June 15, 2014.
  8. ^ a b c d e f "Elizabeth Fox-Genovese: Unorthodox scholar", The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 4, 2007.
  9. ^ a b Fox–Genovese, Elizabeth (April 2000). "A Conversion Story". First Things (102): 39–43. Retrieved May 11, 2009.
  10. ^ Genovese, Eugene (2009), "3. Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage; Nature and Grace", Voices; Vol. XXIV, No. 2 (online ed.), WF-F, archived from the original on June 24, 2010.
  11. ^ 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.
  12. ^ a b Within the Plantation Household Archived August 22, 2014, at the Wayback Machine, University of North Carolina Press.
  13. ^ a b Cathy Young (January 8, 2007). "The Evolution of an Antifeminist". The Boston Globe. Retrieved April 18, 2008.
  14. ^ Biography of Fox-Genovese Archived September 10, 2006, at the Wayback Machine at the Women's Studies Department], Emory University.

Further reading

External links