Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times – Elizabeth Wayland Barber

Description

The 30th-anniversary edition of a historical account, called brilliantly original by Katha Pollitt (Washington Post Book World), that reframed our understanding of womens lives in early societies.

New discoveries about the textile arts reveal women’s unexpectedly influential role in ancient societies.

Twenty thousand years ago, women were making and wearing the first clothing created from spun fibers. In fact, right up to the Industrial Revolution the fiber arts were an enormous economic force, belonging primarily to women.

Despite the great toil required in making cloth and clothing, most books on ancient history and economics have no information on them. Much of this gap results from the extreme perishability of what women produced, but it seems clear that until now descriptions of prehistoric and early historic cultures have omitted virtually half the picture.

Elizabeth Wayland Barber has drawn from data gathered by the most sophisticated new archaeological methodsmethods she herself helped to fashion. She argues that women were a powerful economic force in the ancient world, with their own industry: fabric.