[1] Her mother, Lily Mary Battherham, was a mathematician who taught secondary school and her father was the literary critic and philosopher Kenneth Burke.
[2] Leacock was raised between the family's apartment in Greenwich Village, New York and their northern New Jersey 150-acre farm, living half of the year in each place.
[3] Living in a social circle that included artists, political radicals and intellectuals prompted into Leacock an ideal "to be scornful of materialist consumerism; to value—even revere—nature; to hate deeply the injustices of exploitation and racial discrimination...and to be committed to the importance of doing what one could to bring about a socialist transformation of society".
[6] She worked at Bank Street College of Education as a senior research associate, from 1958 to 1965,[7] and at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in the social sciences department, from 1963 to 1972.
[5][9] Although highly qualified, Leacock credited her CCNY appointment to the rise of the women's movement and social pressure felt by City College to diversify its faculty.
[10] Her appointment coincided with the publication of her celebrated introduction to Friedrich Engels' The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State.
In that introduction, she cited contemporary research to further explicate Engels' theory that "the historic defeat of the female sex" and subjugation of women began with the stratification of society, the widespread practice of private property, and the emergence of a state.