- Eleanor Leacock
Eleanor "Happy" Leacock (1922 New Jersey - 1987 Hawai'i) was a theorist of anthropology, focusing on the issue of gender during the feminist movement. [McGee & Warms
Anthropological Theory 4th ed. McGraw Hill: 2008]----
Eleanor "Happy" Leacock was born in 1922 in New Jersey. Her mother Lily was a mathematician, and her father was a notable writer,
Kenneth Burke . Leacock did her undergraduate work atRadcliffe and completed her graduate training atColumbia University . She married film maker Richard Leacock in 1941. She is known for her ethnographic work inLabrador with the Montagnais-Naskapi people, influenced byWilliam Duncan Strong . During this 1950 study, Leacock found the Montagnais-Naskapi's life was changed due to the fur trade. [MooreVisions of Culture AltaMira Press: 2004.]Though she now has the status of a "classic" anthropologist, Leacock struggled to get a full time job. She taught as an adjunct for decades before taking a full time job at City College in 1972. Her appointment occurred after writing her celebrated introduction to Frederick Engels' "The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State."She single-handedly resuscitated Engels' theory that linked female domination to the rise of classes and the state in which he termed as "the historic defeat of the female sex." [Engels, Frederick, 1972 [1888] , "Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State"Italic text,' New York: International Publishers, pp. 120-121."]
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, blaming capitalism for the result of female subordination. (McGee & Warms
Anthropological Theory 4th ed. McGraw Hill: 2008).References
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