Elizabeth Fox-Genovese: Paternalism's Daughter

358 Pages·2021·3.021 MB·English

by  Deborah A. Symonds (author)

ELIZABETH FOX-G ENOVESE

ELIZABETH FOX- GENOVESE
Paternalism’s Daughter
Deborah A. Symonds
University of Virginia Press • Charlottesville and London
University of Virginia Press
© 2021 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
First published 2021
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Symonds, Deborah A., author.
Title: Elizabeth Fox- Genovese : paternalism’s daughter / Deborah A. Symonds.
Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2020. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2021010959 (print) | lccn 2021010960 (ebook) | isbn 9780813945132
(cloth) | isbn 9780813945149 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: Fox- Genovese, Elizabeth, 1941– 2007. | Historians— United States—
Biography. | Feminists— United States— Biography.
Classification: lcc e175.5.f698 s96 2020 (print) | lcc e175.5.f698 (ebook) |
ddc 907.2/02 [b]— dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010959
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010960
Cover photograph/frontispiece: Dr. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (Stuart A. Rose Manuscript,
Archives & Rare Book Library, Emory University)
For my wife, Melissa, and our children, Sarah and Samuel

CONTENTS
Preface: The Many Betseys ix
Prologue: A Life Writer’s Unwritten Life 1
Part I. Family and Upbringing
1 The Family as Matrix: When Elizabeth Ann
Was a Car, 1922– 1941 15
2 Fitting the Child to the Childhood: A WASP,
Canonical, and Gendered Education, 1941– 1963 40
3 From Fido to Fox- Genovese: Confronting
Paternalism’s and Anorexia’s Sway, 1963– 1969 68
Part II. Intellectual Orienteering with Freud and Marx
4 The Quiet Voice: Psychoanalysis and Enlightenment,
1969– 1976 103
5 Woman of Letters: Becoming a Marxist Boulevardière,
1976– 1983 129
6 Returning to Ithaca: Becoming a Women’s Studies
Scholar and Southernist, 1980– 1986 154
Part III. Refashionings
7 Leaving Home: A Feminist Critic’s Move South, 1986– 1992 183
8 Retreating and Regrouping: After the Wall Fell, 1992– 1998 224
9 Right with God: Public Catholic Intellectual and
Southern Scholar, 1998– 2007 243
Epilogue: A Feminist Manqué 267
Notes 279
Index 325
PREFACE
THE MANY BETSEYS
Elizabeth Fox- Genovese was my mentor and friend. I first met her
in 1980, when I was a graduate student at what was then the State Uni-
versity of New York at Binghamton. The next year I asked her to chair
my dissertation committee. I had no idea who she was nor who Eu-
gene D. Genovese, her husband, was either. She was obviously smart,
interested in women’s history, and moving from French economic to
U.S. women’s history. She, for the most part, happily lived a life driven
by work: writing, teaching, editing, speaking, dining with colleagues
and students, and, with her husband and many others, coauthoring
books and essays, watching baseball, walking dogs. She also drove fast
cars, constantly. Visiting her could be exhausting.
Until the end of the 1990s, I saw her less often once I’d finished my
graduate work. Then, yet again, as about every decade, Betsey and
Gene decided to lead in forming another scholarly group, this time
The Historical Society. I joined, and I saw them more often, saw them
proofreading the first volume of The Mind of the Master Class and ed-
iting material for the Journal of the Historical Society. Betsey’s health
constantly declined, not only from various illnesses but from the cock-
tail of drugs required to control them. One day she called, wanting
to discuss moving to a condominium. Late in 2006, Gene called, de-
manding that I speak to his wife, because, he claimed, she was killing
herself. Betsey promptly took the phone from him and insisted that
all was well and that he was overreacting. I suspected that he wasn’t.
There was little I could do.
I knew Betsey for twenty-s ix years, but the impressions she made on
me will only be the memories of one person. I have tried to judge my
own recollections as critically as I would others’. What makes this bi-
ography meaningful is the impact Betsey had. What makes the telling
possible are the voluminous personal and less personal papers she left,
ix