Eleanor Leacock

Leacock's best-known work is her 1981 book *Myths of Male Dominance*, in which she argued that gender inequality was not universal in pre-class societies. She drew extensively on her ethnographic research among the Montagnais-Naskapi (Innu) of Labrador to support this thesis.

Leacock conducted fieldwork among the Montagnais-Naskapi (Innu) people of Labrador in northeastern Canada. Her historical and ethnographic research focused on how colonial contact and the transition to capitalist economic relations transformed previously egalitarian gender relations in these communities.

Leacock applied Marxist and feminist frameworks to the anthropology of social evolution and gender relations. She argued that women's subordination originated with the development of private property and class society, drawing on and extending Friedrich Engels' *The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State*.

Leacock's 1972 edition of Engels' *The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State* included an extensive introduction and scholarly commentary that updated Engels' arguments with twentieth-century ethnographic evidence. It became an important text in both feminist anthropology and Marxist social theory.