Ahmed Kanna, « Bury Class Society Before It Buries Us All », 2022

She describes her anger at doing the “triple duty” of motherhood, professional activity, and radical political work, at the practical logistical hindrances to this work and the “marginal income I can with reason attribute to my sex.” (Myths.) The work of the later Margaret Mead—an erstwhile teacher and mentor—theoretically justifying Cold War U.S. heteropatriarchy added to this sense of anger.

This offered graduate students like Leacock the chance to work with some of the discipline’s early luminaries, scholars such as Ruth Benedict, Marian Smith, Gene Weltfish, Gladys Reichard, and Margaret Mead. Yet, initially, Leacock saw little connection between working with such scholars and her own emerging critique of theories justifying women’s subordination. For the most part, she was deeply skeptical of their “historical particularism,” a theory of culture they shared with most of their male colleagues, which disdained the social evolutionism of Lewis Henry Morgan and Engels.

… her scathing critique of Mead, published in the Communist Party’s Daily Worker during the height of postwar McCarthyism.