Eleanor Leacock

Eleanor "Happy" Leacock (1922–1987) was a theorist of anthropology, focusing on the issue of gender during the feminist movement.[1]

Leacock was born in 1922 in New Jersey. Her mother Lily was a mathematician and her father was world-famous literary critic, philosopher, and writer Kenneth Burke. Leacock did her undergraduate work at Barnard College[2] and Radcliffe College and completed her graduate training at Columbia University. She married film maker Richard Leacock in 1941. They had four children. The marriage broke up in 1962. Her second husband (from 1966) was Civil Rights and Union activist James Haughton.[3]

She is known for her ethnographic work in Labrador with the Montagnais-Naskapi people, influenced by William Duncan Strong. During this 1950 study, she found the Montagnais-Naskapi's life was changed due to the fur trade.[4]

She was at Bank Street College of Education as Senior Research Associate, 1958–1965,[2] and at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in the social sciences department, 1963–1972.[2] She struggled to get a full time job. She taught as an adjunct for decades before taking a full time job as a professor of anthropology[2] at City College and Graduate Faculty of City University of New York[2] in 1972. Her appointment occurred after writing her celebrated introduction to Frederick Engels' The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. She resuscitated Engels' theory that linked the domination of women to the rise of classes and the state in which he termed as "the historic defeat of the female sex."[5]

One of Leacock's most fruitful contributions to the field of anthropology was her essay entitled, "Interpreting the Origins of Gender Inequality: Conceptual and Historical Problems" (1983). In this piece, she argues the importance of male and female relationships. Leacock also brings up the difference between sex (biological), and gender (culturally prescribed norms for sex). Leacock uses a Marxist approach to her ethnographies, arguing that capitalism is largely responsible for female subordination (McGee & Warms Anthropological Theory 4th ed. McGraw Hill: 2008).

Leacock died in 1987 in Hawai'i.

Bibliography

References

  1. ^ McGee & Warms Anthropological Theory 4th ed. McGraw Hill: 2008
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Biographical note for Leacock, Eleanor, Women's Status in Egalitarian Society: Implications for Social Evolution, in Current Anthropology, vol. 33, no. 1, supp. Inquiry and Debate in the Human Sciences: Contributions from Current Anthropology, 1960–1990 (Feb., 1992 (ISSN 00113204 & E-ISSN 15375382)), p. 225 (essay originally appeared in Current Anthropology, vol. 19, no. 2 (Jun., 1978)).
  3. ^ James Haughton, the son of West Indian immigrants was born in Brooklyn, New York, on October 8, 1929. His papers are at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center [1].
  4. ^ Moore Visions of Culture AltaMira Press: 2004.
  5. ^ Engels, Frederick, 1972 [1888], Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, New York: International Publishers, pp. 120-121.