Lioness

Touchstone has lost a valued member of its family, and America has lost one of its leading intellectual lights, with the death of historian (and Touchstone contributing editor) Elizabeth Fox-Genovese on January 2, 2007 at the age of 65. Author of many books on a dazzling array of subjects, including most recently a massive and definitive study of proslavery ideology coauthored with her husband Eugene Genovese, Betsey also was an adult convert to the Roman Catholic Church, being received in 1995. (Gene soon followed his wife, returning to the church of his youth.), This conversion seemed especially remarkable, at least on the surface, given her former visibility and influence as a lioness of academic Marxism and feminism. But in fact, there was a striking consistency in her life’s pattern, albeit one that runs so completely against the typical academic’s grain as to be unintelligible to those who think in conventional ways.

She has told the story of her conversion in an article in the April 2000 issue of First Things (where she also was a contributing editor), and a reading of that account is a necessary starting place for assessing the background to her change. But anyone who followed the track of her published work knows that the change was not nearly as great as it might have seemed. Looking backward at her pilgrimage, one can say that for Betsey, Marxism and feminism, although clearly heresies, were the kind of heresies that point one toward the truth. For like all heresies, they contained an important piece of the truth, a piece that can be built upon once it is freed from association with falsehood.

Marxism spoke much truth about the degradation of a world where all human relations are reduced to the exchange of inert commodities. Even after their conversions, both of the Genoveses retained their strong aversion to the deification of the market and the exaltation of “choice”; and one reason for their lifelong interest in proslavery ideology was precisely because of its precapitalist eschewal of the cash nexus as an adequate basis for human relations. They retained a lot of Marx, but they had turned Marx on his head; for when Marx said famously that “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions,” it turned out that he was righter than he knew. The injustices that Marxism identified were not illusions; the illusion was the solution that Marxism proposed, which turned out to be an intensification without limit of the very soullessness it sought to combat.

As for feminism, it is not a coincidence that one of Betsey’s most important books was called Feminism Without Illusions. It was in fact a critique of individualism, grounded in the insistence that no workable notion of equality between men and women could be based on an assumption of the interchangeability of men and women, and the reduction of marriage and childbearing and family life to contractual relationships. It also pointed out the presumptuousness of the feminist movement, in assuming that the concerns of a small number of elite academic women spoke for all women. This theme took on added prominence in her 1996 book “Feminism is Not the Story of My Life”, which simply listened to the concerns of a wide range of American women, and found that the standard feminist narrative simply didn’t touch these women’s lives. With the publication of that book, she had ensured that her status as a lioness of American feminism had come to an end.

But a lioness she remained. I had the pleasure of working together with Betsey as a member of the National Council on the Humanities, where she was a formidable and valued presence, until her illness made her unable to attend meetings. She always had a nose for quality, and was vigilant about even the most minute matters. She never did anything by rote, never went through the motions, and her amazing energy and the power of her critical intellect filled the room. No one who knew her will ever forget her.