Ursula's Alcove

Catalog : Books : History

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

Softcover $ 17.95
ISBN 0 393 31348 4

WW Norton & Company
1994, 5 1/2" X 8 1/8"
334 pages.

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. The extreme perishability of what women produced is largely responsible for that omission - a gap that leaves out virtually half the picture of prehistoric and early historic cultures. But today new discoveries about the textile arts are revealing women's vital role in pre-industrial societies.

Elizabeth Wayland Barber has drawn from the data gathered by the most sophisticated new archaeological methods - methods she herself helped to fashion - to show that women were a powerful economic force in the ancient and early modern worlds, with their own industry: fabric.