Elizabeth Wayland Barber
what seems like it would be a dusty, dry, academic tome, Women's Work was really quite an enjoyable read, Reconstructing women's life and position in society from Paleolithic times to the Iron Age using advanced archeological methods as well as methods borrowed from other areas of research linguistics, for example, Barber delves into the world of textilesin particular, spinning and weavingfor what it reveals about the culture and society of the day.
As a quiltmaker, I was interested in the development of clothmaking techniques but even more fascinated by the social and cultural connections being made, As I was reading, I was reflecting on possible connections with the textile world todayhow cloth is used in fashion and in craft as a form of expression.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, Barber's writing style is engaging her own experience as a weaver, having been taught to weave by her own mother, gives a more direct insight into exploring methods of weaving through centuries.
Whether or not you choose to accept all of her conclusions, you can't walk away from this book without a far deeper understanding of the connections between textiles and society in general, and a deeper understanding of a woman's daily life in a variety of contexts over the centuries.
My one critique, although it's an understandable one, is that she focuses solely on the Western world, Clearly there is an ancient tradition of textiles in the Eastern world as well, To cover both in one book would most likely lead to either more cursory and therefore dissatisfying examinations of each, or a book so long that anyone would hesitate to crack open the front cover! I would love to see a sequel by Barber following the Eastern tradition or by another author as long as that author was as easy and enjoyable to read as Barber!.
If you're interested in textiles, in weaving, in women's issues, or in the exploration of culture, I do highly recommend this book, a thoroughly fascinating read on the history of textiles from the palaeolithic through to the iron age,
because the subject is so perishable, the history has to be reconstructed using a patchwork of unusual sources, from the first known twisted rope made,years ago, which was preserved only as an imprint in a lump of clay, to the use of textiles as social and trade goods in ancient greece, egypt, and mesopotamia, this book explores the process of making textiles, how the process developed over time in different areas, and the social and economic role textiles have played throughout most of human history.
there are a few negatives to this work, which came out inthere is almost no mention of east asia or the americas, which i would have loved to hear more about.
as well, the chapter on legends, myths, and fairy tales feels a bit out of place and is much less interesting than the rest of the book.
on a personal level, this book added a lot of interesting context and history to the little i know about spinning, weaving, and making textiles, which i learned over a few years as a kid at a historical summer camp in new brunswick.
we picked and carded wool and spun it on drop spindles and spinning wheels, and also retted, broke, and spun flax, as well as learning other historical household crafts.
The focus is on Europe and the Mediterranean with a tiny bit of Asia, and sadly completely leaves out the Americas and Africa, But, for what it does cover, it is very good, It was fascinating to learn how spinning and weaving developed in different areas and what fibers they used and why, And then it is interesting to see how the different fibers and techniques start to move around from region to region as trade and migration increase.
An enjoyable read. Who knew there was a history to string Or how much can be deduced from ancient cloth fragments which have survived This is a fascinating book about recent theories and discoveries about weaving and cloth work in the ancient world based on archeological findings and cultural research.
Great illustrations. With many references to Homeric women spinning and weaving, this was a good companion read for The Odyssey, but would appeal to anyone interested in the history of clothing or fabric arts.
,New discoveries about the textile arts reveal women's unexpectedly influential role in ancient societies,
This book made me happy to the bottom of my nerdy little heart, Genuinely fascinating social and economic history of textile manufacture, including the neolithic string revolution snare, nets, cloth, that traditional folk costumes often continue patterns and techniques from the neolithic string skirts, patterned borders, spinning in folk tales, clothing that can be made without cutting precious cloth togas, chitons, tunics, plaids as skirts, textiles as royal gift exchanges, the value of weavers as prisoners, the technological developments of looms as well as the immense value of reproducing the technology to gain insight into the social organization of its use many weaving patterns, once actually reproduced, show that it requires two or more people working in concert.
All of this is supported by vivid and carefully chosen material from visual and written records Athenian comedy took home weaving as a baseline for a large number of jokes.
Read for my thesis. Really great collection of material but I wish she'd organized the book a little better once it got past ancient Crete,stars. This would beif ithadn't been writtenyears ago andthe illustrations weren't primarily drawings done by the author,
Otherwise, there's a reason why this book has been checked outtimes and used on course reserves, This is a solid, accessible work examining the economic and cultural lives of women through the lens of textile production, It's a book about the subtle clues in artifacts, like loom weights in an area that does not usually have vertical looms weaving suggests an influx of women from another area, either through migration or through abduction and enslavement.
There are sections that aren't especially clear to this nonweaver, such as when Barber describes the patterns along textiles' edges and how they were created.
In general a half dozen youtube videos would go a long way towards explaining the howto as well as the history of fabric production, Venus de Milo has lost her arms, but if you know what to look for, you can tell that she was spinning, This wonderful book is a master course in getting the maximum amount of information from the tiniest bits of surviving evidence archaeological, linguistic, textual, artistic, etc.
Even present day activities can help us interpret ancient ones, I responded to this book as a quilter, who works with textiles as a woman, who is habitually left out of history books and as a person, who is dazzled by the myriad detective skills needed to delve into our ancient past.
Excellent book on the origins and development of spinning and weaving in Middle East and Europe, Ms. Barber, an archeologist and weaver, has an engaging style, She not only tells us what we know about the early history of weaving, she shows us how we know, She is also very apolitical in her approach she neither praises nor condemns the treatment of women throughout this early period of history Neolithic to the Iron Age.
She restricts herself to the data, Highly recommended for those interested in social history, textiles, and women's history, This is basically the Guns, Germs, and Steel of textiles, fabrics, and the women who weave with them, My entry point in this book was Gregory Clark's excellent Big History book A Farewell to Alms, where he discussed how in large part the first phase of the Industrial Revolution was almost entirely driven by productivity improvements in the textile industry.
Weaving being then as now a primarily femaledominated industry, I was interested to learn more about the sociological effects of that revolution, and though this book wasn't what I was expecting at all, covering "only" from the Paleolithic to the Iron Age, there's still lots that should be right up the alley of anyone looking for something in the intersection of archaeology, textiles, and the feminization of labor.
There are probably many different economic rationales for why some professions have been considered "women's work" for tens of thousands of years, but the most basic one is pretty straightforward: if some relatively simple task is compatible with having to take care of children, it will probably be women who are doing it.
Barber quotes a researcher who lists the following characteristic of such jobs: "they do not require rapt concentration and are relatively dull and repetitive they are easily interruptible I see a rueful smile on every care giver's face! and easily resumed once interrupted they do not place the child in potential danger and they do not require the participant to range very far from home.
" There's a lot to ponder in that description, It's interesting that even in thest century it seems like knitting is still almost exclusively a female hobby, even when the woman in question doesn't have kids.
Barber doesn't go into why that is, but she does discuss the question of why, given that women dominated
the ranks of knitters, most laborsaving technology like the spinning jenny was invented by men.
Barber's explanation is that women were so busy trying to keep up with demand that didn't have the time to sit around and play with technology.
That sounds plausible, although it seems like even in ancient times enough clothing was being made for luxury use that at least one woman would have the time to think "There's got to be a better way.
"
Regardless of how weaving came to be considered women's work, it's obvious that most of the women who did the work took pride in it and developed traditions around it.
Barber discusses how the basic style of string skirt that survives today in Eastern European peasant garb has been almost unchanged for nearly,years, which is pretty mindblowing.
Fascinatingly, it appears that certain more advanced weaving concepts like the heddle were so conceptually difficult that they were only actually invented once thus allowing archaeologists to roughly date when various tribes split off from each other by whether they possessed the advanced concepts or not.
In between defining important terms like carding, twill, or worsted, Barber follows weavers from the earliest records of the Paleolithic through the Neolithic and the agricultural revolution, to Bronze Age societies like the Minoans, Middle Kingdom Egyptians, and Myceneans, and finally to the Iron Age and classical Greek civilization.
There's lots of good discussion behind things like the storytellingthroughfabric tradition that includes the famous Bayeux Tapestry, or why different types of looms were adopted in some places but not others, or how class structure did or did not affect weaving a surprising number of powerful queens wove just like commoners, albeit with higherquality fabrics, leavened with citations from all over the place, such as the Odyssey, Greek mythology, and peasant folklore like the stories in Grimm's.
I was disappointed that she ended two thousand years before the vast changes of the Industrial Revolution even aside from the economic impact of the women in the textile industry then, surely the cultural impact of tricoteuses such as Madame Defarge in Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities would have been worth a mention, and even today, women in the garment trade are a vital part of the development of countries like Bangladesh.
Probably the additional scope would have resulted in a book several times the size, but even with its limits, this is a very wellresearched and interesting look at the history of weaving and its role in the world from a primarily female perspective.
Barber is funny too here's her relating a story from Xenophon about Socrates' friend Aristarchos buying a bunch of wool to keep his female houseguests busy:
"As a result, resources were found, and wool was bought.
The women ate their noon meal while they worked, and quit working only at suppertime and they were cheerful instead of gloomy, Presently Aristarchos returned to tell Socrates how splendidly everything was working out, But, he adds, the ladies are displeased at one thing namely, that he himself is idle, The story ends with Socrates suggesting that Aristarchos tell them that he is like the apparently idle sheepdog, who gets better treatment than the sheep because his protection is what allows them all to prosper.
We do not hear how that fable went over with the women, but we know how it would be received today, " I love this bookvery informative and interesting simply for the way the author approaches research, Anyone who wears clothes or uses sheets or towels or any other sort of textiles should read this, .
As a quiltmaker, I was interested in the development of clothmaking techniques but even more fascinated by the social and cultural connections being made, As I was reading, I was reflecting on possible connections with the textile world todayhow cloth is used in fashion and in craft as a form of expression.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, Barber's writing style is engaging her own experience as a weaver, having been taught to weave by her own mother, gives a more direct insight into exploring methods of weaving through centuries.
Whether or not you choose to accept all of her conclusions, you can't walk away from this book without a far deeper understanding of the connections between textiles and society in general, and a deeper understanding of a woman's daily life in a variety of contexts over the centuries.
My one critique, although it's an understandable one, is that she focuses solely on the Western world, Clearly there is an ancient tradition of textiles in the Eastern world as well, To cover both in one book would most likely lead to either more cursory and therefore dissatisfying examinations of each, or a book so long that anyone would hesitate to crack open the front cover! I would love to see a sequel by Barber following the Eastern tradition or by another author as long as that author was as easy and enjoyable to read as Barber!.
If you're interested in textiles, in weaving, in women's issues, or in the exploration of culture, I do highly recommend this book, a thoroughly fascinating read on the history of textiles from the palaeolithic through to the iron age,
because the subject is so perishable, the history has to be reconstructed using a patchwork of unusual sources, from the first known twisted rope made,years ago, which was preserved only as an imprint in a lump of clay, to the use of textiles as social and trade goods in ancient greece, egypt, and mesopotamia, this book explores the process of making textiles, how the process developed over time in different areas, and the social and economic role textiles have played throughout most of human history.
there are a few negatives to this work, which came out inthere is almost no mention of east asia or the americas, which i would have loved to hear more about.
as well, the chapter on legends, myths, and fairy tales feels a bit out of place and is much less interesting than the rest of the book.
on a personal level, this book added a lot of interesting context and history to the little i know about spinning, weaving, and making textiles, which i learned over a few years as a kid at a historical summer camp in new brunswick.
we picked and carded wool and spun it on drop spindles and spinning wheels, and also retted, broke, and spun flax, as well as learning other historical household crafts.
The focus is on Europe and the Mediterranean with a tiny bit of Asia, and sadly completely leaves out the Americas and Africa, But, for what it does cover, it is very good, It was fascinating to learn how spinning and weaving developed in different areas and what fibers they used and why, And then it is interesting to see how the different fibers and techniques start to move around from region to region as trade and migration increase.
An enjoyable read. Who knew there was a history to string Or how much can be deduced from ancient cloth fragments which have survived This is a fascinating book about recent theories and discoveries about weaving and cloth work in the ancient world based on archeological findings and cultural research.
Great illustrations. With many references to Homeric women spinning and weaving, this was a good companion read for The Odyssey, but would appeal to anyone interested in the history of clothing or fabric arts.
,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,
Women's history and textiles! This is my wheelhouse, A very readable interesting examination of textiles and what we can deduce about them and about the women almost always women who made them, This book makes me want to learn how to spin and weave, but I'm not going to, because NO NEW HOBBIES, especially those that require new equipment.This book made me happy to the bottom of my nerdy little heart, Genuinely fascinating social and economic history of textile manufacture, including the neolithic string revolution snare, nets, cloth, that traditional folk costumes often continue patterns and techniques from the neolithic string skirts, patterned borders, spinning in folk tales, clothing that can be made without cutting precious cloth togas, chitons, tunics, plaids as skirts, textiles as royal gift exchanges, the value of weavers as prisoners, the technological developments of looms as well as the immense value of reproducing the technology to gain insight into the social organization of its use many weaving patterns, once actually reproduced, show that it requires two or more people working in concert.
All of this is supported by vivid and carefully chosen material from visual and written records Athenian comedy took home weaving as a baseline for a large number of jokes.
Read for my thesis. Really great collection of material but I wish she'd organized the book a little better once it got past ancient Crete,stars. This would beif ithadn't been writtenyears ago andthe illustrations weren't primarily drawings done by the author,
Otherwise, there's a reason why this book has been checked outtimes and used on course reserves, This is a solid, accessible work examining the economic and cultural lives of women through the lens of textile production, It's a book about the subtle clues in artifacts, like loom weights in an area that does not usually have vertical looms weaving suggests an influx of women from another area, either through migration or through abduction and enslavement.
There are sections that aren't especially clear to this nonweaver, such as when Barber describes the patterns along textiles' edges and how they were created.
In general a half dozen youtube videos would go a long way towards explaining the howto as well as the history of fabric production, Venus de Milo has lost her arms, but if you know what to look for, you can tell that she was spinning, This wonderful book is a master course in getting the maximum amount of information from the tiniest bits of surviving evidence archaeological, linguistic, textual, artistic, etc.
Even present day activities can help us interpret ancient ones, I responded to this book as a quilter, who works with textiles as a woman, who is habitually left out of history books and as a person, who is dazzled by the myriad detective skills needed to delve into our ancient past.
Excellent book on the origins and development of spinning and weaving in Middle East and Europe, Ms. Barber, an archeologist and weaver, has an engaging style, She not only tells us what we know about the early history of weaving, she shows us how we know, She is also very apolitical in her approach she neither praises nor condemns the treatment of women throughout this early period of history Neolithic to the Iron Age.
She restricts herself to the data, Highly recommended for those interested in social history, textiles, and women's history, This is basically the Guns, Germs, and Steel of textiles, fabrics, and the women who weave with them, My entry point in this book was Gregory Clark's excellent Big History book A Farewell to Alms, where he discussed how in large part the first phase of the Industrial Revolution was almost entirely driven by productivity improvements in the textile industry.
Weaving being then as now a primarily femaledominated industry, I was interested to learn more about the sociological effects of that revolution, and though this book wasn't what I was expecting at all, covering "only" from the Paleolithic to the Iron Age, there's still lots that should be right up the alley of anyone looking for something in the intersection of archaeology, textiles, and the feminization of labor.
There are probably many different economic rationales for why some professions have been considered "women's work" for tens of thousands of years, but the most basic one is pretty straightforward: if some relatively simple task is compatible with having to take care of children, it will probably be women who are doing it.
Barber quotes a researcher who lists the following characteristic of such jobs: "they do not require rapt concentration and are relatively dull and repetitive they are easily interruptible I see a rueful smile on every care giver's face! and easily resumed once interrupted they do not place the child in potential danger and they do not require the participant to range very far from home.
" There's a lot to ponder in that description, It's interesting that even in thest century it seems like knitting is still almost exclusively a female hobby, even when the woman in question doesn't have kids.
Barber doesn't go into why that is, but she does discuss the question of why, given that women dominated
the ranks of knitters, most laborsaving technology like the spinning jenny was invented by men.
Barber's explanation is that women were so busy trying to keep up with demand that didn't have the time to sit around and play with technology.
That sounds plausible, although it seems like even in ancient times enough clothing was being made for luxury use that at least one woman would have the time to think "There's got to be a better way.
"
Regardless of how weaving came to be considered women's work, it's obvious that most of the women who did the work took pride in it and developed traditions around it.
Barber discusses how the basic style of string skirt that survives today in Eastern European peasant garb has been almost unchanged for nearly,years, which is pretty mindblowing.
Fascinatingly, it appears that certain more advanced weaving concepts like the heddle were so conceptually difficult that they were only actually invented once thus allowing archaeologists to roughly date when various tribes split off from each other by whether they possessed the advanced concepts or not.
In between defining important terms like carding, twill, or worsted, Barber follows weavers from the earliest records of the Paleolithic through the Neolithic and the agricultural revolution, to Bronze Age societies like the Minoans, Middle Kingdom Egyptians, and Myceneans, and finally to the Iron Age and classical Greek civilization.
There's lots of good discussion behind things like the storytellingthroughfabric tradition that includes the famous Bayeux Tapestry, or why different types of looms were adopted in some places but not others, or how class structure did or did not affect weaving a surprising number of powerful queens wove just like commoners, albeit with higherquality fabrics, leavened with citations from all over the place, such as the Odyssey, Greek mythology, and peasant folklore like the stories in Grimm's.
I was disappointed that she ended two thousand years before the vast changes of the Industrial Revolution even aside from the economic impact of the women in the textile industry then, surely the cultural impact of tricoteuses such as Madame Defarge in Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities would have been worth a mention, and even today, women in the garment trade are a vital part of the development of countries like Bangladesh.
Probably the additional scope would have resulted in a book several times the size, but even with its limits, this is a very wellresearched and interesting look at the history of weaving and its role in the world from a primarily female perspective.
Barber is funny too here's her relating a story from Xenophon about Socrates' friend Aristarchos buying a bunch of wool to keep his female houseguests busy:
"As a result, resources were found, and wool was bought.
The women ate their noon meal while they worked, and quit working only at suppertime and they were cheerful instead of gloomy, Presently Aristarchos returned to tell Socrates how splendidly everything was working out, But, he adds, the ladies are displeased at one thing namely, that he himself is idle, The story ends with Socrates suggesting that Aristarchos tell them that he is like the apparently idle sheepdog, who gets better treatment than the sheep because his protection is what allows them all to prosper.
We do not hear how that fable went over with the women, but we know how it would be received today, " I love this bookvery informative and interesting simply for the way the author approaches research, Anyone who wears clothes or uses sheets or towels or any other sort of textiles should read this, .