Marriage: The Dream That Refuses to Die (American Ideals and Institutions) - Hardcover

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1933859628 ISBN 13: 9781933859620

Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2008

Synopsis

Nearly everywhere and at all times, marriage has enjoyed a privileged status as the primary social unit—the essential bond that created alliances between families and a bridge between the sexes. In joining a man and woman, marriage attempted to hold men to collective social standards, including responsibility for the women they impregnated and the children they fathered, while also stringently hedging in women’s sexuality. In short, marriage has always demanded that both men and women sacrifice a considerable measure of individual freedom. In marriage, “I” becomes “we,” and “we” frequently extends beyond the couple to extended family, clan, and society. For these reasons, both political and religious authorities typically have taken great care to present marriage as an institution to which individual interests must be subordinated.

At the time of her death in January 2007, the celebrated historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese was worried that these attitudes were in the process of being reversed. In this book, which she was in the midst of preparing for publication at the time of her passing, she argues that marriage is disintegrating under the rising demands that it serve not the good of the whole but the desires of the individual. A union that at one point was used to limit individual “rights” is now claimed as one right among many. The sexual liberation movements of the last forty years have seriously undermined marriage, argues Fox-Genovese, so much so that the institution seems to face the threat of extinction.

Even so, she writes, “Marriage for love—the promise of an enduring and engulfing bond between a man and a woman—is a dream that refuses to die. . . . It still promises that we will finally be loved as we long to be loved.” That dream is the ultimate theme of this book, a fitting coda to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s distinguished career.

About this title

About the Author:

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (1941–2007) was the Eléonore Raoul Professor of History at Emory University, where she was also the founding director of the Institute for Women’s Studies. She received the National Humanities Medal from President Bush in 2003, was a member of the Governing Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was a recipient of the Cardinal Wright Award from the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. Her books include Women and the Future of the Family; Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a Historical Society (coedited with Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn); and “Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life”: How the Elite Women’s Movement Has Lost Touch with Women’s Real Concerns.

From Booklist:

Based on some of the last lectures historian Fox-Genovese (1941–2007) delivered, this little book concisely corrals her thought about marriage. Shaped by her professional passage from Marxist-feminist women’s studies pioneer to Catholic convert concerned about the effects of secular liberalism, she eventually saw marriage as mortally endangered by individualism, which corrodes traditional familial and other group identifications with the acid of personal will and desire. Particular individualist ideologies, including feminism, market capitalism, and civil rights egalitarianism, have powerfully, if sometimes inadvertently, attacked marriage as the foundational institution of women’s oppression and the conventional family as a thwarter of women’s self-realization. Everywhere, individualism has tended to transform human relations from transactions of mutual responsibility into competitions that the stronger contestant wins; for example, the woman prevails over the child in utero, as she should according to the logic of abortion rights. Never denying the real benefits of individualism, Fox-Genovese prefers Christianity for better balancing the independent and social dimensions of each human being. One needn’t be religious to be made more thoughtful, more mindful, by her arguments. --Ray Olson

About this edition

• Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1933859628
• ISBN 13: 9781933859620
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 225