In her 1991 book Feminism Without Illusions, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese called herself “temperamentally and culturally conservative” but also “a proud feminist.” Now, the second half of that paradox has given way. In her new book, “Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life” (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 275 pages, $ 23.95), she portrays feminists as radicals who see men as the enemy, heterosexuality as a conspiracy, and children as hindrances to be “fit into the nooks and crannies” of lives whose important satisfactions lie elsewhere. For a sometime leftist, it has been a wholesome evolution.
To be sure, this professor of history at Emory University still wanly associates herself with feminism here and there in these pages. And she takes pains to balance her indictments of feminists with parallel charges against ” conservatives,” those, in her telling, who believe that parents can meet their responsibilities in only one way: by the mother’s looking after the children full time. Against these two contrasting foils, Fox-Genovese sets out to describe the way “most women” (and she) think and live. At its best, her method is illuminating, though it fails to camouflage the book’s real drama: a sensible woman’s disenchantment with contemporary feminism.
