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Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, 1941-2007

A few years back, a "basic catalog of worldviews"--a book passing in review the tenets of different philosophical outlooks, such as Christian theism, deism, existentialism, Eastern pantheistic monism, and postmodernism--was published under the title The Universe Next Door. It's a good title. It helps capture the inner drama of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, the distinguished historian who died this month at the age of 65: In the course of her adult life, she moved from one mental universe into another.

In the late 1970s, when she and her husband, historian of slavery Eugene Genovese, founded the journal Marxist Perspectives--and in 1986, when she founded the Institute for Women's Studies at Emory University--she was a secular intellectual who identified herself with feminism and leftist thought. By early 1996, when her book Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life appeared, she had undergone a marked evolution. But the reservations that book expressed about feminism were couched in terms of common sense: "Most women," she noted, don't share the feminists' contempt for femininity or their undervaluing of marriage and motherhood. "Sensible women" are simply puzzled by feminists' strident opposition to the "mommy track," the notion that part-time or low-pressure jobs are good for many mothers in their most intensive child-rearing years.

But all the while, a deeper development of her thinking was under way. In December 1995, it led her into the Catholic church. And in the last decade of her life, it flowered in a depth of spirituality and a philosophical clarity few achieve. Several of her essays written since 2000 and posted on the web by the organization Women for Faith and Family (www.wf-f.org) reveal how completely she had broken with the individual-rights-based outlook dominant among her academic peers.