Leela Dube (27 March 1923 – 20 May 2012) was a renowned anthropologist and feminist scholar, fondly called Leeladee by many.

Although she had taught earlier at Osmania, Dube's academic career really began in 1960 at Sagar University, Madhya Pradesh.

Due to the team effort of women's studies scholars (including Leela Dube), RC 32 was institutionalised in the World Sociological Congress.

At different times, Leela Dube was associated with the Indian Council of Social Science Research and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

Visibility and Power: Essays on Women in Society and Development, co-edited by Leela Dube, Eleanor Leacock and Shirley Ardener and published by the Oxford University Press in 1986, provides an international perspective for the anthropology of women in the contexts of India, Iran, Malaysia, Brazil and Yugoslavia.

Her piece, "On the Construction of Gender: Hindu Girls in Patrilineal India", Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.

Women and Kinship: Comparative Perspectives on Gender in South and South-East Asia, by Leela Dube, United Nations University Press (1997), argues that kinship systems provide an important context in which gender relations are located in the personal and public arenas.

She provides an understanding of the socialization of the girl child in the patriarchal family, with the "seed and soil" theory propagated by Hindu scriptures and epics symbolizing a domination-subordination power relationship between men and women.