Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, a noted historian and intellectual whose turn toward conservatism made her a controversial figure in her field of women's studies, died Jan. 2 in Atlanta after a long illness. She was 65.
The cause was complications after surgery in October, according to an announcement by Emory University, where she had taught since 1986.
Fox-Genovese earned distinction early in her career as an authority on 18th century France, and in the late 1970s co-founded the journal Marxist Perspectives with her husband, historian Eugene Genovese.
She and her husband became known as "radicalism's royal couple" whose specialty was the history of the American South. She focused on the history of women in the antebellum South in works such as "Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South" (1988), a highly regarded social history of slave and slave-holding women.
At Emory, she founded the Institute for Women's Studies, which under her leadership became the first in the nation to offer a doctoral program in the field. She served as its director until 1991.
Her evolution from left-leaning feminist to a conservative public intellectual became evident in the 1990s, when she began to voice reservations about such issues as abortion and women in the workplace.
The titles of two of her books from that decade more than hint at the change in her thinking: "Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism" (1991) and "Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life" (1996), an anecdotal account based on interviews with 40 women alienated by the contemporary feminist movement.
In the first book, Fox-Genovese argued that feminism and the American belief in individualism had proved "at best a mixed blessing for women who, freed from community domination, face society with inadequate protection."
She urged greater consideration of women's "special roles as bearers and rearers of children," a theme she continued to develop in the second book, which proposed such solutions as more part-time work with benefits and special individual retirement accounts to pay for extended maternity leaves that a woman could contribute to as soon as she entered the workforce.
Some reviewers favorably compared the author to Betty Friedan, the late feminist leader who in later years became more conservative in her calls for family-friendly feminism. Fox-Genovese "has brought balance, careful academic intelligence to a public debate that has been too often characterized by cheap polemics," Katie Roiphe wrote in the Washington Post.
