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

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

Elizabeth Wayland Barber

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#3570 of 3,809 books · #1111 in History

Shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History (1994).

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. She argues that women were a powerful economic force in the ancient world, with their own industry: fabric.

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Publisher
W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN-13
9780393285581
Genre
History
Topics
Textile historyWomen's economic rolesPrehistoric and ancient societies

Other awarded books from Elizabeth Wayland Barber

Elizabeth Wayland Barber has no other awarded or shortlisted books yet.

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