I note today the passing of the distinguished historian and woman of faith, Dr. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. I had first read Dr. Fox-Genovese when I was in my graduate program in history (The Origins of Physiocracy : Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France, Cornell University Press) but, as the ponderous title of her book might suggest, I did not read anything else of hers after acquiring my degree and leaving academia behind. However, I re-discovered her years later when her disillusions with the feminist movement brought her to the public stage...in a much different role.Dr. Fox-Genovese was the founding director of the Woman's Studies program at Emory University in 1986 and, through the program, established the first doctoral program in the field. However, as Western feminism became more radical (especially in its brutal insistence on abortion), Dr. Fox-Genovese's intellectual honesty burned through the hype, the peer pressure, and the shrill lack of logic to become an outspoken critic of the movement. It was this intellectual honesty (and courage) that eventually led to her conversion to Christianity.
Dr. Fox-Genovese persevered in her academic work at Emory and continued to write scholarly history. But she added to her career works of cultural criticism and religion, including Women and the Future of the Family (2000), "Feminism is Not the Story of My Life": How the Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch With the Real Concerns of Women (1996), and Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (1991). She also assumed several responsibilities in the defense of the sanctity of life, including affiliation with and service to Family Reserach Center's Center for Human Life and Bioethics and the editorial board of Women for Faith and Family.
As she herself related, it was a realization of the pride and self-centeredness of secularist thinkers that startled her into questioning her beliefs -- and which later caused her to find the humility and gratitude which comes from surrendering to the Lord Jesus Christ.
"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."For more on Dr. Fox-Genovese, you can read the obituaries from the Atlanta Constitution and from Women for Faith and Family. And better still, please read Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's 'A Conversion Story" published on the web site of First Things.
