Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Southern slaveholders proudly pronounced themselves orthodox Christians, who accepted responsibility for the welfare of the people who worked for them. They proclaimed that their slaves enjoyed a better and more secure life than any laboring class in the world. Now, did it not follow that the lives of laborers of all races across the world would be immeasurably improved by their enslavement? In the Old South but in no other slave society a doctrine emerged among leading clergymen, politicians, and intellectuals -- "Slavery in the Abstract," which declared enslavement the best possible condition for all labor regardless of race. They joined the Socialists, whom they studied, in believing that the free-labor system, wracked by worsening class warfare, was collapsing. A vital question: to what extent did the people of the several social classes of the South accept so extreme a doctrine? That question lies at the heart of this book. - Publisher.

In this startling and provocative new book, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, the founder of the Institute for Women's Studies at Emory University and the author of the controversial Feminism Without Illusions, says out loud what many women have only whispered: "Feminism is not the story of my life." In pursuing issues that primarily concern upscale career women, the leaders of the national feminist movement have lost sight of the reality of most women's lives. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, in extensive interviews and conversations with women from diverse backgrounds, uncovers the issues that the feminist elite has missed. Here are working-class women and professionals, single and married mothers, whites, Latinas, and African-Americans - all struggling to live independently and to have families. For these women, traditional feminism, with its dismissal of marriage and motherhood as oppressive and limiting, excludes them. Listening to their stories, teasing out attitudes and information from polls and trends, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese spells out a new kind of feminism, a "family feminism" based on the facts of women's lives. It is a feminism that draws women together based on the things they have in common, that promotes their rights while taking into account their responsibilities, that trusts women to set their own priorities rather than try to live up to an unattainable ideal.

Discusses how class, race, and gender shaped women's experiences in the South.

"In Women and the Future of the Family, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese explores how the powerful drives for liberation and equality not only granted freedom to women but also under-mined the essential character of the family as a social unit." "Fox-Genovese analyzes the legal, social, and religious impact of this individualism. To counter it, she calls for a return to an ethic of self-sacrifice and a recovery of a Christian understanding of sexual difference and human equality."--Jacket.

Slaveholders were preoccupied with presenting slavery as a benign, paternalistic institution in which the planter took care of his family, and slaves were content with their fate. In this book, Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese discuss how slaveholders perpetuated and rationalized this romanticized version of life on the plantation. Slaveholders' paternalism had little to do with ostensible benevolence, kindness, and good cheer. It grew out of the necessity to discipline and morally justify a system of exploitation. At the same time, this book also advocates the examination of masters' relations with white plantation laborers and servants -- a largely unstudied subject. Southerners drew on the work of British and European socialists to conclude that all labor, white and black, suffered de facto slavery, and they championed the South's "Christian slavery" as the most humane and compassionate of social systems, ancient and modern. - Publisher.

"In May 1998, a group of prominent scholars announced the formation of the Historical Society, an organization that sought to be free of the jargon-laden debates and political agendas that have come to distance so many readers from their interest in historical scholarship."--BOOK JACKET. "In this first book from the Historical Society, several founding members explore central topics in the field, including the sensitive use of historical records, sources, and archives; the debates over teaching history in the public schools; the enduring value of the practice of history; and much more. Reconstructing History is sure to challenge and inform scholars, students, educators, and the many general readers who have become lost in the culture wars."--BOOK JACKET.

The Mind of the Master Class tells of America's greatest historical tragedy. It presents the slaveholders as men and women, a great many of whom were intelligent, honorable, and pious. It asks how people who were admirable in so many ways could have presided over a social system that proved itself an enormity and inflicted horrors on their slaves. The South had formidable proslavery intellectuals who participated fully in transatlantic debates and boldly challenged an ascendant capitalist ('free-labor' ) society. Blending classical and Christian traditions, they forged a moral and political philosophy designed to sustain conservative principles in history, political economy, social theory, and theology, while translating them into political action. Even those who judge their way of life most harshly have much to learn from their probing moral and political reflections on their times - and ours - beginning with the virtues and failings of their own society and culture.