Marking the Death of an Ex-Marxist--Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Today we mark the death of a noted historian and women's studies scholar, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, in Atlanta, at the age of 65. For the past few years Dr. Fox-Genovese suffered from multiple sclerosis. She had major surgery in October from which she never recovered.

At the time of her death Dr. Fox-Genovese was the Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities at Emory University in Atlanta. In 1986 she founded the university's Institute for Women's Studies and served as its director until 1991.

Earlier in her life Fox-Genovese was an avowed Marxist and married a leading Marxist historian, Eugene Genovese. The couple later renounced and disavowed Marxism and began writing material on the South and traditional family values, leading Dr. Fox-Genovese to be viewed as a pariah in radical feminist circles despite her pioneering work in the field of women's studies.

The following interview with Eugene and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is found on the website of the American Enterprise Institute. It is a most interesting read. The Liberty Sphere mourns the passing of this noted scholar and historian who came to see the failure of Marxism and embraced the American system of free enterprise.


'Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese have been dubbed "the royal couple of radicalism" by Vanity Fair. Long regarded as the nation’s leading Marxist historian, an expert on the antebellum South and slavery, Eugene Genovese has of late become a lacerating critic of the academic Left and a defender of the Southern Right. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, whose most recent book is titled Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life, was a pioneer in the field of women’s studies—yet she has become a pariah in feminist circles, not least for her defense of traditional families.

As a girl, Mrs. Fox-Genovese had three ambitions: to become the first woman president, to marry a black man, and to have 21 children. As a boy, her husband dreamed of a Communist America. They got a happy marriage instead. Editors Bill Kauffman and Scott Walter interviewed the couple at their Atlanta home.

TAE: You’re from a patrician family. What did they think when you married a Sicilian Marxist?

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: There was a little initial, how shall we say, opposition. I was absolutely outraged. I was sure I had brought them the man whom I had been brought up to marry. And they didn’t immediately recognize it, not because he was Sicilian or working class, but my father was a long-standing Cold Warrior and was a little nervous about Marxism. Gene also had two previous marriages to his credit, and something of a reputation as a "swinger."

MR. GENOVESE: I kidded her father years later, told him he was a terrible father. I said I never would have let a daughter of mine marry me.

TAE: What would your favorite education reform be?

MR. GENOVESE: I would start by abolishing the Department of Education. I was ready to vote for Lamar Alexander, who, I thought, was a terrible Secretary of Education, on the grounds there is always room on a mourners’ bench for repentant sinners. I would also close down half to two-thirds of the colleges in the country and transfer that money to secondary education. If we were doing what we should be doing at the secondary level, our students would be getting the equivalent of the first two years of college anyway.

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: Many too many people go to college, but they can’t get jobs without college. We have a cultural elite and a political economy that has devalued manual labor and frequently doesn’t pay it or abolishes the jobs.

I’d certainly restore single-sex schooling. I’d favor a voucher system. I would favor public subsidy for religious schools, while allowing them to retain their religious principles and identity.

MR. GENOVESE: One of the things that has struck me is the way in which the Catholic schools have been turned into secular institutions, because if you can’t discriminate in hiring, much less the content of the curriculum, what makes you a Catholic school except that it gives you an angle to beat taxes?

I cannot get over this business with Father Curran protesting the loss of his Church license to teach theology at Catholic University in Washington. Was it really an issue to be taken to the secular courts, loaded with Jews, atheists, and Protestants, over whether a Catholic university should be able to determine what is proper to teach as Catholic theology? This is a bad joke.

We’ve had a problem with an excellent prep school in Georgia because they would only hire Christian teachers. I think they are making a mistake, but a mistake they’re entitled to make.

TAE: Would you make the same defense of a white supremacist who owned a restaurant and didn’t want to serve blacks?

MR. GENOVESE: That’s a trickier question. We’ve had a history of racial antagonism in this country which brought on the most ghastly war in our history. It’s poisoned our life as a nation. And I would be in favor of certain minimal dos and don’ts on that score, enforced nationally.

The real tragedy of the South and integration was that they let the federal government do what they should have done themselves. If they had started 10 years earlier to make education separate but genuinely equal—and they were making real strides at the last minute when they finally saw the magnitude of the threat—I wonder how it would have turned out. I think segregation was wrong on principle, but I’m not sure that if they had succeeded the condition of black schools in the South wouldn’t be a lot better.

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: We missed that opportunity so we are stuck with the problem of kids who come from families that don’t have traditions of education, that don’t have books around, who largely come from an oral culture into which television and various forms of rock music can very easily be fed.

MR. GENOVESE: The high school I went to in Brooklyn was half-Italian, half-Jewish. The Jewish kids came out of homes where education was a big thing. The Italian kids came out of homes where it was not. My father was an exception.

And in the end, I can cry over a number of the Italian kids I grew up with, one smarter than the next, who never really developed intellectually because they had no future. What was lost?

But on the other side of it, we had tough teachers who taught us. I don’t care what kind of a home you came out of, you went into an English class with Miss O’Mealia—she was a bitch on wheels, but when you finished a class with her, you could parse a sentence and you knew how to read and write.

And that’s all been lost, I’m afraid. When I hear about the public school situation in New York now I want to cry.

TAE: In Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life, you refer to mothers who "work out of necessity." Are the yuppies who place their 3-month-olds in day care buying into the materialistic culture you often criticize?

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: Of course they are. I have enough respect for freedom, and enough horror at the sanctimonious bullying that surrounds us, not to tell other people what to do. But yes, I think that some significant percentage of the yuppie career women who are putting their kids in day care at a very early age are driven by some combination of the consumer culture and a misguided sense that they have to be as busy as their husbands. The necessity is more psychological than material; it’s tragic.

TAE: Tocqueville argued that the only way you would have strong families, under modern liberal democracy, would be to emphasize sex role differences more than in the past. Was he right?

MR. GENOVESE: Why the Good Lord, after Adam turned out to be such a wimp, gave him authority over Eve is something I—well, I’m not going to suggest the Good Lord did not know what He was doing, but it remains somewhat puzzling.

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: In order to have greater specialization in sex roles, we need something that the elite, including the conservative elite, isn’t vocally, visibly giving us: a defense of marriage, especially where there are children, that really does make divorce more difficult. You can’t specialize in being a woman if he can walk out with his secretary, or young law associate, without ever looking back. That’s self-immolation.

We need social respect, and even support, for motherhood. We should have deductions for children, and less emphasis on deductions for child care and the earned income tax credit, which tend to support single mothers and working women at the expense of women who stay home.

TAE: Was the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment a good thing?

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: Yes, in retrospect. At the time I thought people who were arguing that it would mean unisex toilets were alarmist. The last decade suggests they weren’t.

TAE: You encouraged the Citadel’s legal team to ask expert witnesses for the opposition which they hated more, men or the South. Which was it?

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: In a lot of ways the South has become a symbol of what the feminist elite doesn’t like about men. The driving thrust of that case was to destroy the Citadel as we know it. But beyond that, to deny to men single-sex education, even if it had to be denied to women as the price, because single-sex education just might help to train men to be better and more responsible men.

TAE: Should we make a distinction between private and public single-sex education?

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: As a matter of law, it’s a meaningless distinction. There are no private schools that do not depend upon their tax-exempt status for gifts they receive from their alums, and that don’t finance up to 40 percent of students’ tuition through federally guaranteed loans.

These days, it’s less-affluent kids who have the greater need for the benefits of single-sex education, and we see that dramatically in the discussions about all-male high schools in the inner city, or all-female math classes. Typically, the students at the Citadel come from families with combined incomes of less than $60,000, and in which one or both parents haven’t finished college. Single-sex education provides a focus that really helps kids like that to develop their potential.

TAE: Are you a Southerner?

MR. GENOVESE: In some ways I have felt a Southerner all my life. My background is Sicilian: it’s all the same. But that doesn’t make me a real Southerner—just ask any real Southerner, no matter how gracious.

TAE: You’ve written, "Rarely, these days, even on southern campuses, is it possible to acknowledge the achievements of the white people of the South." Why?

MR. GENOVESE: For most of its history, the South was a slave society in a way that the North, which tolerated slavery into the nineteenth century, was not, because the South developed a social system based on slavery. There is a natural revulsion to that legacy. However, along with it went a very strong conservative tradition, and I think what we’re witnessing today is an attempt to combat a Southern conservative tradition by demonizing it.

TAE: What insights are found in the Southern conservative tradition that are not found in traditions north of the Mason-Dixon line?

MR. GENOVESE: The main argument of the Southerners was that the social relations in the North—what we would now refer to as capitalism—were inherently revolutionary and undermined traditional values. It’s the same argument Marx made in The Communist Manifesto, except he liked it, and they didn’t.

Northern conservatism was a rear-guard action, doomed to fail; whereas, as long as slavery existed, the South had a social system that could sustain its values.

TAE: Why the anti-Southern hysteria today?

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: There’s a painful irony or genuine bad faith there: some people’s history is worthy of respect and other people’s isn’t. It’s one thing to say that slavery is an abomination; it’s another to decide on how to treat the South in the wake of the War. In my judgment, segregation was much less excusable than slavery. Slavery had been the way of the world, and it was recognized as wrong at a historical moment. But segregation was artificial from start to finish.

MR. GENOVESE: You could appeal to the Bible to support slavery. The attempt to appeal to the Bible to support segregation was contemptible. And there is an interesting wrinkle to this. What made segregation possible, after the War, was the extent to which scientific racism became the vogue. After the War, scientific racism sweeps the South. It had swept the North before the War: Harvard was teaching that stuff, but no Southern college would touch it because it was unscriptural.

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: When you bring these issues of eugenics up to today’s debates, the contradictions in all of this are absolutely mesmerizing. Because it’d be a piece of cake to argue that radical pro-abortion and pro-right-to-die starts with your personal choice, and yet the next step is euthanasia, where who gets to choose is ambiguous. Not to mention sex selection and the obsession with amniocentesis: absolutely a new eugenics. The folks who push this, however, are the first to scream against any hint of biological base for racial difference, which in fact is extraordinarily suspect.

On the other hand, sex differences are real differences. So you have the contradiction of people who are defending the right of biologically fit individuals to shape who shall live and who shall die, which is very eugenicist, at the same time they are denying the significance of biological difference between the sexes.

MR. GENOVESE: We know people who are lifelong liberals, staunch supporters of the civil-rights movement, and they will say privately what they never say publicly, that one of the major reasons they support abortion rights is because they see no other way to control the number of black and Hispanic babies being born.

TAE: Will women benefit if the courts bring us gay marriage?

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: In my humble opinion, no one will benefit, and marriage as we have known it will virtually disappear from the face of the Earth. If we have same-sex marriage, we will have it on the grounds that marriage exists to provide financial benefits and personal gratification for individuals.

Same-sex marriage is the logical outcome of instrumental sex, sexual equality, equality in sexual pleasure between women and men, divorce and abortion at will. It reduces marriage to a matter of personal fulfillment or gratification, and contractual convenience. And the whole notion of marriage as founding families, the integral unit that binds society, will be lost.

TAE: Why does lesbianism occupy such a hallowed place in contemporary feminism?

MR. GENOVESE: They run the mimeograph machines.

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: And because it’s been able to take the moral high ground of anti-male purity. Feminist theory has to get more and more radical to justify its existence; if it simply merges with the mainstream, there’s no reason not to absorb women’s studies into other departments.

TAE: Do the two of you attend church, and are you believers?

MR. GENOVESE: Betsy converted to Catholicism a year ago, and I went to confession and returned to the Church about a week ago.

TAE: What do you think of the view that Marxism is really just secularized Christianity?

MR. GENOVESE: When I first heard that argument, I sneered. Over the years, I came to see that there was a good deal of truth in that. At this point I am much more in tune with the argument that Marxism and much of Enlightenment thought can fairly be considered a heretical development of the Christian religion.

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: I was never a radical of any kind. As for the period in which I defined myself as a Marxist—I perfectly understand that no one on the Right could have understood this—it was in large part as a conservative reaction to the radicalism that was going on in the emerging women’s and cultural studies circles.

TAE: Mr. Genovese, you were not only a Marxist but also a member of the Communist Party and a self-described Stalinist. Having been so spectacularly wrong before, why should we listen to your advice on matters political?

MR. GENOVESE: I am painfully aware of my mistakes, and I’m not about to put down anybody who says, "I don’t have to listen to you." From the 1960s, when I was positioned on the far left, I was very active in insisting on a dialogue with conservatives. I always insisted that there were good and bad people in all political camps and that most people were opportunists anyway.

TAE: You’re the only couple alive who could write for both Chronicles and Commentary. Where would each of you place yourselves in the current political universe?

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: I am on [former Pennsylvania Governor Bob] Casey’s Campaign for the American Family. I think very highly of Dan Coats’s American Renewal proposal. I voted for Bush in ’92, with some enthusiasm. I will vote for Dole. My primary concern with the Republicans these days is that we don’t have a good middle ground between the conservative Right that tends towards Buchanan, on the one hand, and the country-club Republicans on the other. I’d be much happier if we had a more socially responsible and compassionate Republicanism, something around Bennett, Kemp, Coats.

TAE: You, Mr. Genovese, cannot tell us that you voted for George Bush in 1992.

MR. GENOVESE: I did, and it was the first time in my life I voted for a Republican presidential candidate, and unlike Betsy, I did so holding my nose and choking. I followed Clinton’s career as governor of Arkansas. I never thought he’d get the nomination, because like everybody else who follows Southern politics, I knew all about his womanizing, and I thought it would kill him. But it was not until I saw his wife and his entourage that I took the measure of what we were dealing with.

My estimate of him was—notwithstanding my bad record—"This sob is going to sell out to big business with a vengeance, and cover his behind by selling out to the radical Left on cultural questions." Those two things are my private nightmare. And that’s what he’s done. I think that this administration is the foulest administration in my lifetime, and maybe in American history. I think these people are moral degenerates, utterly devoid of any principles whatever.

TAE: Speaking of degenerates, both of you are experts on political correctness on campus.

MR. GENOVESE: We’re not concerned about anything that’s been done to us because our academic positions have been invulnerable. But if they can get away with this stuff for somebody who was president of the Organization of American Historians and all that crap, what do you think they’re doing to our young colleagues and students?

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: A number of us wrote a textbook, and after Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life came out, the primary author removed my name from the text, on the grounds that women in departments would veto the adoption of the book because my views were beyond the pale.

Here’s another one:A student in an English department at a prestigious university had been preparing for the qualifying exam with two of her best friends. They expelled her from the group because she was Christian. I had this student in class. She’s a brilliant student, but I couldn’t have told you for sure she was a Christian. It wasn’t an issue. But for her friends, this was a matter of principle. This is in part the lesbian thing again, because the suspicion was that if she were a Christian, she might not be sufficiently sympathetic to lesbianism.

TAE: Is Jesse Jackson a great political leader whose effect has been salutary?

MR. GENOVESE: Jackson has got himself into a box from which it’s very difficult to escape. He has veered very sharply to the left, and he has never explained this shift because he was culturally very conservative in critical ways, even on abortion. I don’t know where that leaves him. He can run for President and get an overwhelming black vote and 10 percent of the white vote, but I don’t see how he could take the next step, unless he returns to where he started. Because what he was saying back in the ’70s has a lot to recommend it.

I don’t think we can just blame Jesse Jackson, because he did make overtures to the Right at that time, and vice versa. But the Right had nothing to offer. On the other hand, there are people like Kemp and his idea about encouraging people to buy their own apartments—a program, by the way, that the Communists executed brilliantly in Bologna. This guy cares—but what person in his or her right mind is going to buy an apartment if their kids have to go to a school that’s violence-ridden, if they can’t go near the windows because there might be a drive-by shooting, if they can’t play on the playground because it’s drug-ridden?

This is what I hate about the whole market mentality. These guys think that if you make the right moves in the economy, everything else follows. But if you’re prepared to deal with it comprehensively, I don’t see any reason that we can’t get better answers out of the Right than out of the Left, because the Left is completely ossified.

TAE: So what are the elements in this comprehensive program?

MR. GENOVESE: I have an idiosyncratic position. I’m opposed to the Balkanization that’s gone with multiculturalism, but since the 1960s I’ve argued that the black experience in the United States has no analogue and justifies the claims of the black nationalists that black people have been a nation within a nation. I don’t think we will solve these problems without granting a good deal of autonomy and police power to the communities in question.

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: I’m strongly in favor, not merely of single-sex schools in the inner cities—and all black, if need be—but boarding schools, preferably five-day rather than permanent. Take kids who come from destitute or single-mother families in crime- and drug-ridden projects, and give them a clean place to sleep and regular meals, physical exercise, the obligation that they do their homework, and tough love.

MR. GENOVESE: At the risk of unfairness and caricature, if you wanted to characterize the policies of the Left since the 1960s, they amount to putting half the folks on the dole in order to support the other half in style as bureaucrats who take care of the folks on the dole. And it’s a very attractive political program because the bureaucrats and social workers have a vested interest in it. And all the folks on the dole can see is whether or not you’re going to pay them the dole or leave them to rot.

I’ve never been more pessimistic about what we euphemistically call race relations in this country than I am now.

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: I think, without undue hyperbole, one could argue that race relations have never been better. And that there may be a real gap between the politics of race relations and how people actually live.

MR. GENOVESE: There are two separate, overlapping questions. One is race relations. The other one is the condition of the black community. These times, for black people, are the best of times and the worst of times. The progress that’s been made in the last quarter-century is astonishing. At the same time it’s gone hand in hand with a condition in the ghettos that is wretched to an unprecedented degree.

In the ’60s, when the Great Society started, I took the position that we were looking at a potential disaster. My argument was that with the new integration, the black middle class and solid working class could move into integrated communities and the ghettos would be cut adrift and decapitated. What kind of a leadership could develop on that basis?

In my more cynical moments, I think that the extent to which the inner-cities have been inundated with drugs has been the best safety valve the regime has had. If these people weren’t strung out on drugs…well, I won’t finish the sentence. But what has struck me forcibly in the last decade is how rhetorically radicalized the black bourgeoisie—both the real bourgeoisie and the pseudo-bourgeoisie of government employees—has become. And I think a good part of that is the terrible strain of feeling that you’re abandoning the brothers and sisters. This tends to cause people to exaggerate every slight into a major problem of racism in their own lives.

TAE: Novelist Walker Percy theorized that because the South is still somewhat influenced by Christianity, maybe this time the South will save the Union. Do you put any stock in that kind
of hopefulness?

MR. GENOVESE: I still threaten to run for governor of Georgia on a program of throwing the Yankees out, but much of the old folkways are going, along with the small towns, and the South is becoming more like the North. The problems that we are dealing with are now national.

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: More people do go to church down here. More people maintain contact with their relatives and their families, nuclear and extended, and more Southerners return home.

TAE: Would that be one way out of the catastrophe of the black ghetto: a repatriation of Northern blacks to their rural Southern roots?

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: I know Southern blacks who maintain that in some ways, life for the black community was actually better under segregation. They don’t like to say it that way because they didn’t like segregation, but what they did like was the mutual assistance, the strength of the churches, the strength of families, and the creating of a world that was secure for kids to grow up in.

MR. GENOVESE: Jackson made this point talking about education. He said, "my mother would see the teacher at church and she would say, ‘I can’t come to the pta meeting, I have to work.’ But they put their heads together on whatever problem there was."

How do you replicate something like that in an urban environment, especially where the church is no longer the center of the community? One of the things that disturbs me more than anything else is the indications among black youth of a significant drop-off in church attendance.

TAE: You’re both big baseball fans. How did Marxism and women’s studies affect your understanding of the game?

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: The first thing that made it clear to me that I was going to be in serious trouble with the women’s movement was back in the early ’80s when I wrote a piece on baseball wives for the Village Voice, which they butchered. I argued that women and men are different and that baseball brings it out. Certainly women could be fans: even Yankee fans, because girls, too, could be for power, corruption, and winning. There is physical identification with the danger—Roger Kahn describing his father throwing a hard ball at him and coming to terms with it; Jackie Robinson at second base with the cleats—that as women we experience vicariously.

MR. GENOVESE: The toughest moment in our marriage was when my wife, who had been a Boston Red Sox fan, switched to the New York Yankees. I was a lifelong Giants fan and grew up hating the Yankees with a special passion. When she did that I knew the marriage was being put to its ultimate test.

MRS. FOX-GENOVESE: I thought I put it to its ultimate test when I beat you at gin.

MR. GENOVESE: That was easier to take. When the Dodgers got Jackie Robinson, I was in the Communist Youth Movement, and I almost got my head handed to me because while I wanted Robinson to succeed, whenever he came up to hit against the Giants, I would be yelling, "Strike the sob out!" It went down hard with the comrades.

Published in Fixing America's Schools September/October 1996