Peggy Reeves Sanday

Peggy Reeves Sanday (1937 – June 13, 2025) was an American cultural anthropologist and academic. She was a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she joined the faculty in 1972 and later became professor emerita. Her research focused on gender, sexual inequality, rape, matrifocality, public-interest anthropology, and the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia. Sanday died on June 13, 2025, at the age of 87. After completing her doctorate, she served as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Pittsburgh and later taught at Carnegie-Mellon University before joining the University of Pennsylvania.

Sanday also wrote on sexual assault and institutional culture on American college campuses. Her books included Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus and A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial.

Her 1981 book Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality examined cross-cultural patterns in male and female power relations.

Honors and recognition Sanday was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and received support from the National Science Foundation. In 2015, she received the annual award for work on gender equity from the Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.

Selected works Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality (1981) Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (1986) Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy (2002)