Leigh Minturn graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1949 and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from Radcliffe College by 1953. She then came to Cornell as part of the South Asia Program's Cornell Rankhandi Project. Her fieldwork focused on the lives of women and children in the Indian village of Khalapur, which she first visited in 1955. She followed the same families a generation later and reported on the changes in traditions, health, and women's autonomy that occured in the intervening years. Her findings were told in her 1993 book Sita's Daughters: Coming Oout of Purdah. She taught at the University of Colorado from 1967 until her retirement in 1994. She died in the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 in 1999.