Eleanor Burke Leacock

Eleanor Burke Leacock

Born: July 2, 1922 - Died: April 2, 1987

Eminent American cultural anthropologist Eleanor Burke Leacock is recognized primarily for her ethnohistorical studies of the changing social and gender relations of the subarctic Innu, her contributions to feminist anthropology, her examination of racism in US school systems. Her prolific career, which spanned four decades, was marked not only by a long list of academic accomplishments, but also by her intense activism to fight race, sex and class discrimination.

As an undergraduate, Leacock attended Radcliffe College where she was introduced to neo-evolutionary. She also began studying Morgan and Marx and became involved with politically radical student groups.

In a drafting class, she experienced her first personal case of sex discrimination when she was not offered employment, solely because she was a woman, despite proving herself to be the worthiest candidate for the position. This made it clear for Leacock that discrimination, rather than ability, was what impeded women’s progress in the workplace and caused her to focus her interest more specifically on gender relations and inequality.

After graduating Leacock wanted to work with Ruth Benedict in Washington D.C. at the Office of War Information to act on her opposition to fascism. However, she failed to pass an FBI background check due to "un-American" activities. With her experience of being persecuted for her political beliefs behind her and the intense focus of the field on historical particularism, she chose to keep her Marxist leanings to herself.

For her dissertation, Leacock asserted that family hunting territories, individually owned and inherited tracts of land, were not aboriginal among the Innu (Montagnais-Naskapi), the subarctic Indian people of Labrador. "Her path-breaking work exploded the prevailing antievolutionary and explicitly anti-Marxist theses (promoted by Frank Speck) that ‘communism in living’ had never existed and that private property existed even in gather-hunter societies. She found that subsistence resources were not privately owned, even after centuries of commodity production; although the rights to trap in given places were privatized, the rights to gather, fish, hunt for food, and so on were still communal" (Gailey 1988: 217). Leacock also looked into post-marital residence patterns and found that in the past, matrilocality had existed. This challenged the notion set forth by Julian Steward, who served on her dissertation committee, that hunter-gather societies were inclined to patrilocality because hunting and trapping were men’s activities.

With her first foray into fieldwork among the Innu of Labrador, Eleanor Burke Leacock began a forty-year long relationship with the study of Native North American peoples. During this time, she pioneered the view that Native North American culture could only be conceived of by looking at the framework of the transformative and harmful forces of colonialism. She redirected the public’s attention to the sources of native cultural resistance and autonomy.

She made clear the effects that colonialism and capitalism had on Native North America during a time when this was either ignored by most anthropologists or explained away by acculturation theory. Leacock "was one of the very few scholars who challenged the ban on Marxist formulation which would help us to understand the presence of subsistence societies on the margins of commercial and industrial societies" (Sutton 1993: 104).

It would not be until 1963 that she would get her first full time job teaching anthropology. Her policy-oriented studies of schooling and mental illness not only reaffirmed her interest in urban and applied anthropology, but also made her work harder than her peers with academic positions at prestigious institutions. She has said that she would not let herself be pushed out of the discipline simply because she did not have an academic job.

Leacock honed her focus as a Marxist feminist, studying the relationship between gender and class in society. She took up Morgan’s hypothesis that an association existed between the development of patriarchy and the processes of class and state configuration. In so doing, Leacock became one of the first modern feminist anthropologists to re-evaluate the connection between the development of the state and women’s loss of authority and sovereignty and provided inspiration for fledgling feminist scholars. However, she did not support the assumption made by some feminists that all social systems, the family unit in particular, were systems of gender inequality. Rather, she argued that egalitarian societies do exist where men and women can do different jobs and remain separate but equal. It was not until the advent of capitalism, according to Leacock, that the family was privatized and separated from the public world of work and the state. When this happened what had once been mere differences in gender, class and race were metamorphosed into inequalities between the colonized and colonizer as women’s work at home became marginalized and depreciated.