Scholarship
Fox-Genovese's academic interests changed from French history to the history of women before the American Civil War. Virginia Shadron, assistant dean at Emory, said that Within the Plantation Household cemented the reputation of Fox-Genovese as a scholar of women in the Old South.
Fox-Genovese also wrote scholarly and popular works on feminism itself. Through her writings, she alienated many feminists but attracted many woman who may have considered themselves conservative feminists. Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz said, "She probably did more for the conservative women's movement than anyone.... voice came from inside the academy and updated the ideas of the conservative women's movement. She was one of their most influential intellectual forces." Fox-Genovese reportedly had no patience with the cultural feminist trend of viewing women and men as possessing completely different values, and she criticized the idea that women's natural instincts and experience of oppression gave them a superior capacity for justice and mercy.
Read more about this topic: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
Famous quotes containing the word scholarship:
“The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo- scholarship which actually destroys its object.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)