Book Review
Sexes United
Marriage: The Dream That Refuses to Die
by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
edited by Sheila O’Connor-Ambrose
ISI Books, 2008
(191 pages, $25.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Anne Hendershott
Individualism, writes Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, promised “delight in bodies and sexuality . . . the legitimacy of desire,” but created a culture “burdened by the rising demands that it serve not the good of the whole but the desires of the individual.”
In her Marriage: The Dream That Refuses to Die, she argues that the language of individual rights both invites one to do as he pleases with a clear conscience and deters disapproving of the choices of others. Naturally, individual “lifestyle choices” now include abortion, as well as almost every imaginable sexual practice, and the notion of marriage as the union of one woman and one man is but one choice among many. Any attempt to oppose or criticize this range of choices is interpreted as “ungenerous, judgmental and intolerant.”
As a leading leftist intellectual who came to publicly oppose same-sex marriage, abortion, and euthanasia, Fox-Genovese endured such accusations personally. The founding director of the Institute for Women’s Studies at Emory University, she drew the ire of pro-choice feminists when she moved from an “uneasy” pro-choice position to the realization that the past oppression of women could never justify present-day women’s oppression of the most vulnerable among us.
A convert from secularism to Catholicism more than a decade ago, Fox-Genovese was, until her death last year, the Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at Emory University. She was also a contributing editor of Touchstone.
A Few Weapons
In her book, an expansion of three lectures delivered at Princeton University in 2003, Fox-Genovese points out that having first acceded to the primacy of the individual, “we are now capitulating to the non-negotiable demands of sexual desire.”
As our culture has “loosened the bonds of sexual repression” that allegedly thwarted individual development and happiness, it has increasingly succumbed to the notion that no sexual desire can be denied. When it also assumes that marriage exists only to serve the interests and comfort of the individual, a society is “left with few weapons against the advance of same-sex marriage.”
Still, this book offers us a few weapons. In the first part, it offers a functional and evolutionary view of marriage as an institution uniting one man and one woman that is necessary to the social, economic, and political flourishing of men, women, and children, and to the cohesion of society. It is necessary “to infuse the most important social bond with a sacramental character.”
She suggests that the real goal for the “hardcore” same-sex marriage activists is not equal access to the benefits that marriage brings, but the destruction of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. And, she maintains, “they aim to discredit all forms of authority—especially God and nature—that dare to tell people how to lead their lives.”
Anne Hendershott is Professor of Urban Affairs at the King's College in New York City (www.tkc.edu). She is the author of Status Envy: The Politics of Catholic Higher Education (Transaction, 2008). She and her husband have two grown children and are members of St. Mary's Church in Milford, Connecticut.
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more on marriage from the online archives
24.1—January/February 2011
Marriage Thrives in Reality, Not in Our Dreams by Nathan Schlueter
32.1—January/February 2019
Divine Love & the Love of Man & Woman Surpass Mere Consent by Anthony Esolen
more from the online archives
32.2—March/April 2019
on Preserving Physical & Spiritual Nourishment by Nathanael Devlin
18.4—May 2005
The Idylls, Idols & Devils That Corrupt the Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian
31.4—July/August 2018
Life & Love Are Real Despite Theatrical Illusions by Anthony Esolen
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