Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, one of the braver souls in modern academe, has died at 65.
A prominent and distinguished scholar, feminist, and historian, like her husband Eugene (whose specialty is the ante-bellum South), she moved personally away from the cushy secular platitudes characteristic of faculty lounges in the ivory tower. But the courage was in then bringing that shifted perspective into the same line of inquiry and studies she had been pursuing.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (she taught at Emory) has the best and fairest obituary I've seen.
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. ... Through her scholarship, Dr. Fox-Genovese alienated doctrinaire feminists and attracted conservatives, especially on women's issues.It quotes Sean Wilentz, one of the more prominent American historians representing the prevailing paradigm (the one that generally has tried to plug its ears when the Genoveses spoke), who is carefully respectful without being enthusiastic: "She had a sharp intelligence and a sharp pen, all the more to raise hackles, and that's good."
But there's no doubt that, to the academic clique, she was a "them," not an "us." As Wilentz says, "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."
A dean at Emory gets it right:"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."Which usually is what you'd say of a liberal/progressive, an I.F. Stone or some such. But where radicalism is orthodoxy, the conservative becomes the progressive, and ... ouch, it makes my head hurt. For a tour through the controversy a life like hers can engender, see the glowing obituary in the National Review, which focuses on her anti-abortion positions:
Betsey knew that public pro-life advocacy would be regarded by many in the intellectual establishment as intolerable apostasy — especially from one of the founding mothers of “women’s studies.” She could have been forgiven for keeping mum on the issue and carrying on with her professional work on the history of the American south. But keeping mum about fundamental matters of right and wrong was not in her character. And though she valued her standing in the intellectual world, she cared for truth and justice more. And so she spoke out ever more passionately in defense of the unborn. And the more she thought and wrote about abortion and other life issues, the more persuaded she became that the entire secular liberal project was misguided. Secular liberals were not deviating from their principles in endorsing killing whether by abortion or euthanasia in the name of individual “choice”; they were following them to their logical conclusions. But this revealed a profound contradiction at the heart of secular liberal ideology, for the right of some individuals to kill others undermines any ground of principle on which an idea of individual rights or dignity could be founded.And compare that with the simplified, muted snark of the New York Times version:
“When we last left Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, at the end of ‘Feminism Without Illusions,’ she was deploring people who ‘find it easy to blame feminism for some of the most disturbing aspects of modern life: divorce, latchkey children, teenage alcoholism, domestic violence, the sexual abuse of children.’ Five years later, it seems she has become one of the people she warned us about.” Ms. Fox-Genovese, who in her early work supported abortion, though with reservations, would in later years equate it with murder. She would also argue publicly that the women’s movement had been disastrous, and extol the virtues of traditional marriage and family.
Fox-Genovese was the sort of feminist that treated women as rational beings, rather than as victimized drones seeking mindless "gender victories".
As we watch the unfortunate Pelosi, hopping up and down yelping "Power! Power! Power!" like a disturbed child with an assault rifle, we can only hope that intelligence will eventually triumph over the effort to turn estrogen into testosterone.
I'm all for traditional marriage.
Multiple wives. Wooo hooo.
Like all things, taking a stand on what you beleive includes alot of semantics on how you view things.... and since I don't know alot about this individual, it's difficult to comment more specifically.
To go back to the early feminist movement, it was much simpler than. The greatest concern was getting a job, and getting paid equally. This proceeded fairly steadily, until the pill and the sexual revolution definitively split the feminist movement. Both sides moved towards 'gender equality', but one side was more interested in empowerment through work/equal relationships while the other moved towards sexual equality and experiencing fantasies previously held only with men. This has been covered many places lately (rarely very well).
And it's a split that has never been dealth with, which is why 'feminism' lacks a cohesive definition anymore. Wether you're talking about 'feminism' as a power-struggle or 'feminism' as debauchery, it often depends which camp you're talking about.
Abortion becomes even murkier. That further divides the camp of feminists from those who 1)think it's a good thing 2)think it's a necessary evil, but don't paritularly like it and 3)think it's murder. As time is going on, those three camps are further fragmenting the movement and you see more and more 2's and 3's in the 'movement' as time goes on.
These two articles just follow those camps logically. The first is a fairly standard pro-life argument, the second is a preety standard pro-choice argument... neither is very substantial.
My recollection is that the Genoveses made the jump from intolerant, venom filled Marxism to intolerant, venom filled Catholic conservativsm, avoiding all waystations in between
liberalhawk:
Eugene Genovese was a one-time Marxist, though so far as I know he was not a notably venomous one. He was a noted expert on slavery and the antebellum South.
As for Fox-Genovese, maybe you can give an example of her intolerance or her venom, preferably one that her critics did not top a hundred times over.
truly came to sincere convictions after playing the devils advocate and followed their hearts to the light of the truth,in spite of their popularity for the pro-abortion cause