Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

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Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (born 1941) is a feminist American historian. She studied at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris in France and attended Bryn Mawr College (B.A.) and Harvard University (M.A. and Ph.D.). She is professor of history at Emory University, where she was the founding director of the Institute for Women's Studies.

1 Basis of feminism
2 Conversion to Catholicism
3 Writings
4 References
5 See also

[edit] Basis of feminism

In her analysis of the issues of assisted suicide and of the dignity of each person that led her to turn away from radical feminism: "Sad as it may seem, my experience with radical, upscale feminism only reinforced my growing mistrust of individual pride. The defense of abortion especially troubled me because of my inability to agree that any one of us should decide who has the right to live."

[edit] Conversion to Catholicism

She was received in the Catholic faith in December 1995. As she relates her own story, she points to the pride and self-centeredness of secularist thinkers as one of the factors which led her to Catholicism:

"An important part of what opened me to Catholicism — and to the peerless gift of faith in Christ Jesus — was my growing horror at the pride of too many in the secular academy. The sin is all the more pernicious because it is so rarely experienced as sin. Educated and enjoined to rely upon our reason and cultivate our autonomy, countless perfectly decent and honorable professors devote their best efforts to making sense of thorny intellectual problems, which everything in their environment encourages them to believe they can solve. Postmodernism has challenged the philosophical presuppositions of the modernists’ intellectual hubris, but, with the same stroke, it has pretended to discredit what it calls "logocentrism," namely, the centrality of the Word. In the postmodernist universe, all claims of universal certainty must be exposed as delusions, leaving the individual as authoritative arbiter of the meaning that pertains to his or her situation. Thus, what originated as a struggle to discredit pretensions to intellectual authority has ended, at least in the American academy, in a validation of personal prejudice and desire."

[edit] Writings

The origins of physiocracy : economic revolution and social order in eighteenth-century France, Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1976.
(with Eugene D. Genovese), Fruits of merchant capital : slavery and bourgeois property in the rise and expansion of capitalism, New York York : Oxford University Press, 1983.
Within the plantation household : Black and White women of the Old South, Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Feminism without illusions: a critique of individualism, University of North Carolina Press, 1991
To be worthy of God's favor : Southern women's defense and critique of slavery, Gettysburg, Pa. : Gettysburg College, 1993
Feminism is not the story of my life : how today's feminist elite has lost touch with the real concerns of women, New York : Nan A. Talese, 1996
Marriage on trial : in defense of an endangered institution, Wilmington, DE : ISI Books, 2004.