Biographies of
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
and Eugene D. Genovese
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese began her career as a specialist in French
History, developed expertise in women’s history in the antebellum
South, and ultimately came to be known as a leading conservative
feminist. With degrees from Bryn Mawr College and Harvard
University, she began teaching history at Emory University, where
she was the founding director of the Institute for Women’s Studies
and began the first doctoral program in Women’s Studies in the
United States.
Having started her career as a Marxist, Fox-Genovese became
increasingly aware of the conflict between Marxism and human rights
and dignity. Her conversion to Roman Catholicism in the 1990s
coincided with a shift to pro-life advocacy, and her outspoken
expression of her views and critiques of liberal feminism brought her notoriety on the left
and admiration on the right.
The author of a number of scholarly works, including Within the Plantation Household:
Black and White Women of the Old South and Feminism is Not the Story of My Life: How
Today’s Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women, as well as The
Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview with
her husband Eugene Genovese, she was the recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the
Cardinal Wright Award from the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, and the C. Hugh Holman
Prize from the Society for Southern Literature.
Fox-Genovese died after a long illness in 2007.
Eugene D. Genovese is considered by scholars on both the left and
the right to be one of the most-influential historians in the field of
American slavery. A graduate of Brooklyn College with advanced
degrees from Columbia University, Genovese has taught at Rutgers
University, the University of Rochester, The College of William & Mary,
and Emory University, among other places.
A prolific writer and respected scholar, his book Roll, Jordan, Roll:
The World the Slaves Made is widely regarded as essential reading by
historians of the era and was a winner of the Bancroft Prize in History.
In 2005, he co-authored The Mind of the Master Class: History and
Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview with his late wife,
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.
From the beginning of his career, Genovese was an avowed Marxist whose public advocacy
of the Viet Cong in the 1960s was the focus of a widely publicized academic free-speech
debate. He was the first Marxist president of The Organization of American Historians. In
the 1990s, however, Genovese became intellectually, politically, and morally disillusioned
with Marxism, and he joined his wife in converting to Roman Catholicism. Together, the
Drs. Genovese helped to found The Historical Society to resist the encroachment of ideology
in historical studies.
Today an outspoken conservative and cheerful rabble-rouser, Eugene Genovese continues
his work from retirement.
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