Gitel (Gertrude) Poznanski Steed (May 3, 1914 – September 6, 1977) was an American cultural anthropologist known for her research in India 1950–52 (and returning in 1970) involving ethnological work in three villages to study the complex detail of their social structure.

Steed began a BA in banking and finance at New York University, but embraced the Greenwich Village artistic and political life, often singing blues in nightclubs, and dropped out to take a job as a writer with the Works Progress Administration.

From 1939 to 1941, Steed undertook research for Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the explorer and writer on Inuit life then planning a two-volume Lives of the Hunters, on diet and subsistence; Steed worked on the South American Ona, Yahgan, and the Antillean Arawak and Carib, and from this formative experience began a dissertation on hunter-gatherer subsistence (not finished until 1969, well after she had established her career).

[9][10] Shortly thereafter, Professor Theodore Abel, department chairman, appointed Steed Director of a two-year field project of research in contemporary India.

[12] She assembled a research team of Dr. James Silverberg, Dr. Morris Carstairs of Edinburgh University, and her husband Robert Steed, leaving for India in 1949, where there was added a small staff of Indian workers.

They included Bhagvati Masher and Kantilal Mehta, who worked as interpreters; Nandlal Dosajh, a psychologist;[13] N. Prabhudas, an economist who conducted the land use survey; and Jerome D'Souza as cook.

Bakrana was a farming economy in fertile flatlands, exclusively Hindu and with an active caste system, largely untouched by the former British rule or by land reform changes current then in India.

[16] Her reputation also rests on her unpublished notes; the thousands of pages of interviews, observations, projective test results, life histories, and villagers' paintings, most of which are now in the special collections of the University of Chicago Libraries.

[21] This, and the presentations she made at conferences assisted her in delimiting her doctoral thesis Caste and Kinship in Rural Gujarat: The Social Use of Space.

Gitel and husband Robert Steed opened the doors of their house on West 23rd Street to visitors who included Ruth Bunzel, Sula Benet, Vera Rubin, Stanley Diamond, Alexander Lesser, Margaret Mead, and Conrad Arensberg.

"[22] In 1953, Steichen mounted Always the Young Strangers exhibition at MoMA in honour of Carl Sandberg's 75th birthday and included Gitel Steed's photos, six of which are in the Museum's permanent photographic collection.

The Gitel P. Steed papers 1907–1980 are archived in the University of Chicago Library and extend to approximately 13 linear metres (43 feet) of material.

Most is data from her Columbia University Research in Contemporary India Field Project of 1949–1951 collected from three villages in western and northern India; extensive life histories of informants, psychological tests, typed notes, field notebooks, photographs, genealogies, histories, transcripts of interviews, and art work, mostly watercolours, by both researchers and child and adult villagers.

Prior to their arrival, James Silverberg and McKim Marriott put the papers a preliminary order reflected in the collection's current organization.