Women's Work : The First 20,000 Years : Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times 0393313484

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W o m e n 's W ork T H E F IR S T 2 0 ,0 0 0 YEARS

Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times

ELIZABETH WAYLAND BARBEE

W O M EN ’S WORK The First 20,000Years 2,500 years ago, the women of Athens worked at home, virtual prisoners of their husbands, expected to provide cloth and clothing for the family. 4,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, there was a very different picture: respectable women were in business for themselves, weaving textiles at home to be sold abroad for gold and silver. Looking back even further to 20,000 years ago, women began making and wearing the first clothing created from spun fibers: string skirts that announced to all a woman's ability to bear children. Indeed, for over 20,000 years, until the Industrial Revolution, the fiber arts were an enormous economic force, belonging prim arily to women. 1 hroughout early history, this art was the primary vehicle for articulating a woman's various roles as mother, provider, worker, entrepreneur, and artist, and was a vital force for self-definition, early steps to creative expression. Modern women searching for their roots w ill not find this part of themselves in most history and archaeology books. Much of this gap of information results from the extreme perishability of what women generally produced — food and clothing. I hese objects do not survive the wear of time as well as houses, tombs, temples, stone sculpture, and the other usual artifacts of archaeology. I hus, in most books on ancient history and economics there isn't even an index entry for cloth o r clothing, despite the enormous toil required in making them. Well may women object: economic studies that omit half the economy—which happens to be the female-produced half—are skewed. Fortunately, archaeological methods of recovering information have been improving rapidly, and we may get the full story not only of our economic development but of the evolution of women's art and place in society. Author Elizabeth Wayland Barber has drawn from data gathered by the most sophisticated new methods for studying the past, methods she herself helped to fashion, shaping a wealth of new information on one of women's most important contributions to past societies—textiles. Her widely acclaimed, monumental study of the technical development of the craft appeared recently in her book Prehistoric Textiles. In this work, the author presents the untold human side of that story: the relations of women and their textile work to society (continued on back flap)

WOMEN'S WORK: THE FIRST 20,000 YEARS

OTHER

BOOKS

BY E L IZ A B E T H

A rc h a e o lo g ic a l D e c ip h e r m e n t P re h isto ric T e x tile s

W AYLAND

BARBER

WOMEN'S WORK: T H E F I R S T 20,000 Y E A R S

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