Leacock, Eleanor Burke

LEACOCK, ELEANOR BURKE (1922–1987). Anthropologist and social activist, Eleanor Burke Leacock documented the political and economic sources of class, gender, and racial oppression. Leacock authored more than eighty articles and ten books and was internationally respected for her scholarship on Marxist social theory. Her writings on race and class, gender, colonialism, and capitalist development informed a tireless political engagement.

Born in Weehawken, New Jersey, and raised partly in Greenwich Village within the circle of political radicals, Eleanor Burke received her doctorate at Columbia a decade after marrying her first husband, the filmmaker Richard Leacock. Leacock’s 1952 doctoral thesis challenged the prevailing contention that private property was universal. The Montagnais-Naskapi “Hunting Territory” and the Fur Trade (1954) analyzed the impact of commodity production on property and labor relations in a foraging society. After eleven years of part-time teaching, and work on the Bank Street School Project, Leacock finally obtained a full-time teaching position at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. While there she wrote a critical appreciation of Lewis Henry Morgan concerning egalitarian societies and cultural evolution (1963); numerous articles on race and class stratification in education, as well as Teaching and Learning in City Schools (1969); and Culture of Poverty: A Critique (1971). In 1972 she was asked to revamp and chair the department of anthropology at City College/City University of New York, where she remained until her death while conducting field research in Samoa on capitalist development and teenage suicide.

Leacock was pivotal in the reemergence of the women’s movement and in the development of Marxist feminism and feminist anthropology, beginning with her edition of Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1972). A selection of her essays on ideologies of gender and theories of women’s subordination appeared as Myths of Male Dominance (1981).

In the 1980s Leacock coedited a series of anthologies: on colonialism and women’s status (Women and Colonization, 1980), on foraging peoples’ resistance to stratification (Politics and History in Band Societies, 1982), and on capitalist development and gender (Women’s Work, 1986). Her purpose in research and writing was human emancipation, and she brought to that endeavor formidable scholarship, insight, and courage.

Gailey, Christine Ward. “Eleanor Burke Leacock.” In Women Anthropologists, edited by Ute Gacs, Jerrie Mclntyre, et al. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

McCoid, Catherine Hodge. “Eleanor Burke Leacock and Intersectionality: Materialism, Dialectics, and Transformation.” Race, Gender & Class. Vol. 15, #1/2(2008), pp.24-41.