Overview

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 methods—methods she herself helped to fashion. In a ""brilliantly original book"" (Katha Pollitt, Washington Post Book World), she argues that women were a powerful economic force in the ancient world, with their own industry: fabric.

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Reviews

"""Elizabeth Barber is as knowing and perceptive as any archaeologist-author in sight…Her topic is wonderfully fresh."" -- Scientific American"

""Elizabeth Barber is as knowing and perceptive as any archaeologist-author in sight…Her topic is wonderfully fresh."" -- Scientific American

Employing diverse, thorough methodologies and research sources, the author of Prehistoric Textiles (not reviewed) traces the roles of women and cloth through 20,000 years of history. Prehistoric women primarily worked with food and clothing, neither likely to survive the elements, and male historians traditionally felt little need or desire to write about cloth and textiles; thus, much of women's work history has been lost, and we are left with few details for reconstruction. However, Barber's innovative research found that data for ancient textiles lay everywhere, waiting to be picked up. By reproducing remnants of ancient cloth and garments, she also reproduced women's actual labor, which often required hours upon hours of tedious, painstaking work. Her justification for the assumption of female responsibility for cloth rests on their childbearing and -rearing duties. Women needed to stay close to home, and they required work compatible with youngsters running around - labor that could be interrupted when necessary. According to Barber, women held important positions in society as the primary producers of clothing for millennia, even into the age of emerging capitalist economies. She also deduces, from the patterns and designs of ancient material, that clothing for both sexes served as a visual means to communicate such information as fertility and marital status. (For example, many skirt remnants hold designs assumed to follow the shape of and emphasize the pubic bone.) Although this seems a logical conclusion, there's not really any empirical evidence for it. An important contribution, in terms of both historical material and interpretation, to the study of women's work. (Kirkus Reviews)

Don't be put off by the dullish title: this is as lively to read as a personal diary and as exciting as a treasure hunt. Using mythological, literary and archaeological evidence, it traces the lost history of women's contribution to the textile industry and illuminates the way they lived. Barber learnt her love of textiles from watching her mother spin and weave. In the course of her quest she toured museums all over the world, danced about in Macedonian girdles to feel how their fringes moved ('I felt exhilarated, powerful; I wanted to make them swish and jump'), and re-created a 3000 year old Celtic plaid on her own loom. (Kirkus UK)

Elizabeth Barber is as knowing and perceptive as any archaeologist-author in sight...Her topic is wonderfully fresh. -- Scientific American Elizabeth Barber is as knowing and perceptive as any archaeologist-author in sight...Her topic is wonderfully fresh. -- Scientific American

Author Information

Elizabeth Wayland Barber is the author of Prehistoric Textiles, The Mummies of Ürümchi, and The Dancing Goddesses, among other works. She is professor emerita of archaeology and linguistics at Occidental College, and lives in Utah.

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