Marie Margaret Keesing (née Martin; 1 December 1904 – 13 July 1961) was an anthropologist and educator with strong ties to the Pacific.
Keesing was born on 1 December 1904, in Auckland, New Zealand, to parents Frederick Samuel Martin and Alice Maude Peart.
[2][3] During their engagement, setting a pattern she would follow throughout their lives, she collaborated with him as he rewrote his Master's thesis for the 1928 publication The Changing Maori (Thomas Avery & Son).
The family lived in Chicago, New Haven, London, Honolulu, Washington, D.C., before settling at Stanford University in the 1940s with Marie and Felix taking American citizenship in 1940s.
As George Spindler, long time Stanford colleague of the Keesings, put it, "She gave up her life, in the agony of grief over his death, on July 13.
"[5] However, in the American Anthropologist obituary for Felix Keesing the following year, her co-authorship of several volumes appears erased.
Under the auspices of a multi-year Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, Felix Keesing relocated to the United States, working at Yale and the University of Chicago.
The IPR, established in 1925, was an international NGO that provided a forum for discussion of problems and relations between nations of the Pacific Rim.
She was a regular participant in the PPWA meetings; she organized many panels and workshops including an important roundtable on the role of women in social systems in 1939.