Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
A celebrated historian and women’s studies scholar, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese roiled both disciplines with her transition from Marxist-inclined feminist to conservative public intellectual. In the first major biography of this singular and controversial scholar, Deborah Symonds explores Fox-Genovese’s enormous personal archive and traces Fox-Genovese’s life from a brilliant girl in the World War II era struggling with demanding parents and anorexia to a woman intellectual in the later twentieth century and into the new millennium, providing an illuminating and moving psychological portrait.
Never settled, Fox-Genovese was, by turns, a French historian, Marxist feminist, literary critic, southern historian, Red Tory, public intellectual, and conservative Catholic—but still, in her eyes, a feminist. This biography sheds new light on its subject’s dynamic and intellectually productive marriage to leftist historian Eugene D. Genovese. In her provocative politics, which confront us still with the complexities of left and right, and her constant search for her place in the world, Fox-Genovese’s story resonates more strongly than ever.
- Julie Saville, University of Chicago, author of The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860–1870The academization of the study of women and gender opened intellectual debates, unsettled administrative routines, and contributed to emotionally charged public controversies in which Fox-Genovese was a central figure. Deborah Symonds captures many of them in this judicious, provocative account.
- Peter A. Coclanis, University of North Carolina, Chapel HillThis smart study offers sophisticated and insightful analyses of Fox-Genovese’s writings, relationships, motivations, intellectual development, and psychological evolution.
- Louis Ferleger, Boston UniversityBeautifully and carefully traces the evolution of one of America's most brilliant thinkers. Symond's masterful writing brings the real Elizabeth Fox-Genovese to life.
- The Journal of Southern HistoryA wonderful book, authored by one of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's former graduate students... What makes this biography so valuable is its representation of Fox-Genovese as 'a rich example of a post-World War II, Western, privileged psychologically fraught woman's striving to escape the paternalisms of her education and culture while reclaiming them' (p. 276). Symonds concludes by saying that Fox-Genovese's work deserves better than to join 'the dustbins and footnotes where [most of us] old scholars go' (p. 276). This exquisite biography might yet succeed in forestalling such a fate.
Deborah A. Symonds is Professor of History at Drake University and author of Notorious Murders, Black Lanterns, and Moveable Goods: The Transformation of Edinburgh’s Underworld in the Early Nineteenth Century.
Prologue: A Life Writer’s Unwritten Life
1. The Family as Matrix: When Elizabeth Ann Was a Car, 1922–1941
2. Fitting the Child to the Childhood: A WASP, Canonical, and Gendered Education, 1941–1963
3. From Fido to Fox-Genovese: Confronting Paternalism’s and Anorexia’s Sway, 1963–1969
4. The Quiet Voice: Psychoanalysis and Enlightenment, 1969–1976
5. Woman of Letters: Becoming a Marxist Boulevardière, 1976–1983
6. Returning to Ithaca: Becoming a Women’s Studies Scholar and Southernist, 1980–1986
7. Leaving Home: A Feminist Critic’s Move South, 1986–1992
8. Retreating and Regrouping: After the Wall Fell, 1992–1998
9. Right with God: Public Catholic Intellectual and Southern Scholar, 1998–2007
Epilogue: A Feminist Manqué
Notes
Index
