In a personal reflection Leacock (1993) traced her radical roots
to her upbringing and political experiences, but her personal
outlook found support in the works of Lewis Henry Morgan
and Friedrich Engels. Leacock wrote that her appreciation of
Morgan “is born out of a perverse reaction to the virtually universal criticism of Morgan encountered in my student days, and
reinforced both by my field experience and by the recognition
that far more of Morgan’s theory is already incorporated into
the science of anthropology than is generally conceded”
(1981b:106).
Christine Gailey notes that from the early 1960s Eleanor Leacock “would focus on the transformation of societies through
colonially catalyzed class and state formation,” giving particular
attention to “the imposition or encouragement of capitalist development in the postcolonial period” and to consequent
changes in women’s authority and autonomy (1993:68).
Leacock’s central argument stemmed directly from her field
experience in Labrador. First, band-organized hunting and gathering societies tend to be characterized by communal ownership
(particularly of land), egalitarian social relations, and nonhierarchical gender relationships (Leacock 1982a). Second, the evolution
of class societies and the development of capitalism also produced
changes from (1) kin-based societies that hold property communally and unify societies as collectivities, into (2) social systems
that define groups which compete for resources and control of
labor—an argument advanced by Morgan (Leacock 1982b:247; see
pp. 26–29). In particular, the expansion of capitalist systems and
the creation of commodity production and exchange resulted in
the restructuring of social control over production and products—
a point made by Marx (Leacock 1981a:14).
Finally, the subordination of women is an inevitable outcome
of these economic changes. In her Labrador research, Leacock
analyzed a very explicit program of economic and social
changes implemented by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Paul le
Jeune, who, as superior of the Jesuit mission of Quebec, studied
Montagnais culture in order to convert and “civilize” the Indians
(Leacock 1980, 1981c). This program involved several steps: the
establishment of permanent settlements instead of traditional,
mobile camps; the creation of chiefs; the introduction of corporal
punishment, particularly of children; and finally the imposition
of Catholic family values based on patriarchy, monogamy, female sexual fidelity, and the abolition of divorce.
How could such different cultural values be successfully imposed on the Montagnais? “The answer,” Leacock wrote, “is that
the Jesuits and their teachings arrived in New France a full century after the economic basis for unquestioned cooperation, reciprocity, and respect for individual autonomy had been undercut
by the trading of furs for European goods” (1980:38). With the
spread of the fur trade and the expansion of capitalism, women
progressively were deprived of control over their labor, although
the Montagnais retained a higher degree of respect and autonomy between the sexes than is found in other societies (Leacock
1980:40–41).
Leacock expanded her analysis beyond Labrador. In an extremely influential article, “Women’s Status in Egalitarian Society: Implications for Social Evolution,” Leacock (1978) showed
how anthropologists’ assumption that women had inferior status
in most traditional societies reflected poor ethnographic research
and the extension of biases inherent in the anthropologists’ own
class societies. Too many anthropologists had dealt with
women’s roles in other societies “with brief remarks about food
preparation and child care” and comments on the sexual division
of labor (Leacock 1978:247). Anthropologists had overlooked the
degree of autonomy women in egalitarian societies have over
their lives and activities, assuming that separate was unequal.
Consequently, anthropologists, extrapolating from their own
class-based societies, found women everywhere of lower status
and then contended that female inferiority was cross-cultural.
Leacock argued that this was false. (For an alternative view by
Ortner, see pp. 311–15.)
Leacock’s feminist anthropology, as Rapp argues, insisted
“on the importance of locating family forms in evolutionary and
historical processes, and on the explicitly political nature of
monogamy, patriarchy, private property, and class relations”
(1993:90). Thus Leacock’s theoretical approach directly stems
from Morgan, Engels, and Marx, but her ethnographic analyses
are so richly documented and tightly argued that they read more
like the writings of Franz Boas.
For Leacock, feminist anthropology was a principal element
of a broader radical critique, one grounded in detailed attention
to historical processes. Although colonialism and capitalism had
common consequences, the ethnographic situations had to be
understood based on specific, well-documented historical cases.
Leacock wrote,
Colonization characteristically brought disruption and devastation to foraging peoples and it is necessary to point this out.
However, for ethical and political as well as scientific reasons,
it is equally necessary to note and to document the resiliency
and creativity with which different peoples moved to survive
in, cope with, and take what advantage they could of new situations in which they found themselves. . . . They evolved new
cultural forms which, although much changed from aboriginal
times, continued to be distinctively theirs. (1978:168)