History & Women, Culture & Faith, Volume 1: Women Past and Present

After completing her first book in the late 1970s, Fox-Genovese turned her attention to the history of women in Europe, and, over the next thirty years, she emerged as a central and controversial figure in women's studies. Published together for the first time, the nineteen essays in Volume I: Women Past and Present reflect Fox-Genovese's influential development as a historian of women, a feminist, and an individual who was not afraid to challenge her own previously held ideas. Yet, while the essays span Fox-Genovese's changing ideology, they also give readers the chance to view Fox-Genovese's work and scholarship as a coherent whole.

Throughout these essays, Fox-Genovese demonstrates a commitment to women's needs, to the study of both women in history and women's texts, and to the claims that society has on female and male individuals. Always informed by a historical perspective, her discussion is sometimes explicitly historical, as in "Property and Patriarchy" or "Women's History in History." In other instances her focus is more contemporary, as in "Feminism and the Rhetoric of Individual Rights" or "Beyond Autonomy." In every case, however, her trenchancy of argument, impressive erudition, and informed passion command serious attention. In her searching introduction, Deborah A. Symonds maps the trajectory of Fox-Genovese's career and the extensive historical and social engagements of Fox-Genovese's scholarship.

Volume 1 also includes a foreword by Peter N. Stearns, provost and professor of history at George Mason University and editor in chief of the Journal of Social History.