Dates:
Occupation:
Known for:
Background, Family:
- Father: Edward Whiting Fox, historian
- Husband: Eugene D. Genovese (historian)
Education:
- Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris
- Bryn Mawr College, 1963, B.A., history and French
- Harvard University, 1966, M.A., and 1974, Ph.D., history
About Elizabeth Fox-Genovese:
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese studied history at Bryn Mawr College and Harvard University. After earning her Ph.D. at Harvard, she taught history at Emory University. There, she founded the Institute for Women's Studies and led the first Women's Studies doctoral program in the US.
After initially studying 17th century French history, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese focused her historical research on women in the Old South.
In several books in the 1990s, Fox-Genovese criticized modern feminism as too individualistic and too elitist. In 1991 in Feminism Without Illusions, she criticized the movement for too much focus on white, middle-class women. Many feminists saw her 1996 book, Feminism is Not the Story of My Life, as a betrayal of her feminist past. She moved from a support, with reservations, of abortion, to considering abortion as murder.
Fox-Genovese converted to Roman Catholicism in 1995, citing individualism in the academy as a motivation. She died in 2007 after 15 years of living with multiple sclerosis.
