Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (1941-2007)

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, a historian of women in the Antebellum South, as well as an animating voice of the contemporary conservative women’s movement, most recently taught at Emory University where she founded the Women’s Studies Program in 1986 and was the Elénore Raoul Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History. She served on the governing council of the National Endowment for the Humanities and on the advisory board of the Center for Religion and Democracy.

Fox-Genovese’s publications include The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (2005); Women and the Future of the Family (2000); Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society, edited with Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (1999); “ Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life”: How the Elite Women’s Movement Has Lost Touch With the Real Concerns of Women (1996).

Her awards include the National Humanities Medal for Work on Women’s History and American Culture in 2003, Doctor of Letters from Millsaps College, and the C. Hugh Holman Prize from the Society of Southern Literature.

Fox-Genovese’s writing first appeared in Signs in Summer 1979, where she commented on various reviews of Linda Gordon’s highly acclaimed Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (1977). More recently, her Feminism without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (1991) was reviewed in Signs by Janet Mason Ellerby in Spring 1993 (Vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 693–98), and her coedited anthology Hidden Histories of Women in the New South Virginia (1994) was reviewed in Signs by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw in Spring 1996 (Vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 779–782).

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese died January 2, 2007.