Dr. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

News Obituary Article

ATLANTA: Dr. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, unorthodox scholar

By KAY POWELL

As a historian, scholar and self-described complex conservative, Dr. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese took comfortable orthodoxy and turned it inside out, generating vitriolic criticism and devoted followers in the process.

Emory University recruited Dr. Fox-Genovese in 1986 as founding director of its Institute for Women's Studies, where she established the nation's first doctoral program in the field, said Dr. Virginia Shadron of Atlanta, assistant dean of Emory's graduate school of arts and sciences.

Through her scholarship, Dr. Fox-Genovese alienated doctrinaire feminists and attracted conservatives, especially on women's issues.

"She probably did more for the conservative women's movement than anyone," said Dr. Sean Wilentz, a Princeton University history professor. "Betsey's 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."

The memorial Mass for Dr. Fox-Genovese, 65, of Atlanta is at 10 a.m. Friday at Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church. She died Tuesday at Emory University Hospital of complications from surgery in October. The body was cremated. H.M. Patterson & Son, Spring Hill, is in charge of arrangements.

"She established herself as an academic leader and a scholar of international significance," said Emory President Dr. James W. Wagner.

Dr. Fox-Genovese's 1988 book, "Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South" was her most courageous book, Dr. Shadron said, and established her as an independent scholar of women in the South.

Her 1996 book "Feminism is Not the Story of My Life: How the Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch With the Real Concerns of Women," published in 1996, and her 1991 "Feminism Without Illusions" critique the women's movement.

Commenting on Dr. Fox-Genovese's 1996 book, Mary Ellen Bork of McLean, Va., said, "I thought it had a very realistic view of the limitations of modern feminism." Mrs. Bork is the wife of the former judge and onetime U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.

Dr. Fox-Genovese stepped into the public realm with her scholarship, Dr. Wilentz said. "The thing I remember most about those books is the way she found to talk to American women she otherwise would not have contact with," he said. "She stepped outside the academy and met intelligent and thoughtful women who changed her own thinking."

A large part of that change was her 1995 conversion from nonbeliever to Roman Catholic, which some found at odds with her pro-women reputation but she found wholly consistent.

She earned her doctorate at Harvard University and was Emory's Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities. Her scholarly interest evolved from French history to the history of black and white women in the pre-Civil War South.

"I found her very interested in other people," Dr. Wagner said. "She was not trying to write an autobiography but history. Like a good historian, she looked out the window, not into the mirror."

Her husband, Eugene Genovese, built his reputation as a Marxist intellectual and collaborated with his wife, most recently in writing "The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview" published in 2005.

Dr. Fox-Genovese's resume is filled with scholarly publications, academic board positions and honors. In 2003, President George W. Bush awarded her the National Humanities Medal. She directed the dissertations of more than 32 doctoral candidates at Emory, and her scholarship is amplified in their influence, Dr. Shadron said.

In 1992, Dr. Fox-Genovese resigned as director of Emory's women's studies institute after she and the university were sued by a woman for sexual discrimination and harassment, a suit the university settled out of court.

Dr. Fox-Genovese said she reacted to the charges with pain and disbelief and called the charges categorically untrue, according to a 1993 AJC article. She continued at Emory as a history professor.

In her scholarship, Dr. Fox-Genovese "was outspoken, she was fearless, she took risks that forced people to consider a full range of historic and contemporary experiences," Dr. Shadron said.

"She believed that the purpose of the life of the mind was to question every orthodoxy. She had an appetite for turning everything over and inside out."

Or, as Dr. Wilentz said: "She had a sharp intelligence and a sharp pen, all the more to raise hackles, and that's good."

Survivors include her brother, Edward Whiting Fox Jr. of Bloomington, Ind., and her sister, Rebecca MacMillan-Fox of Miami.

© 2007 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution