How peculiar it is for an author gathering up essays that first saw life in, among other places, Marxist Perspectives and Signs to declare herself “temperamentally and culturally conservative.” How even more peculiar it is that one is tempted to believe her. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, well known in academic circles for a book on the antebellum plantation household, is not afraid to admit her doubts about the feminist-left wave that has crashed onto university lawns—is not even afraid to ascribe a certain cogency to a pronouncement made by Allan Bloom from “a position about which [she] admittedly [has] deep reservations.” She says she still prefers history to self-satisfying myth, and professes acceptance of “some notion, however secularized, of original sin,” which sounds a lot like human nature, the very thing the academic Left thinks it repealed long ago.
Feminism without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism, by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (University of North Carolina Press, 326 pp., $24.95)
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