Skip to product information
1 of 1

W. W. Norton & Company

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

Regular price $13.95 USD
Regular price Sale price $13.95 USD
Sale Sold out
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Title
Title: Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (Revised)
Author: Elizabeth Wayland Barber
ISBN: 0393313484
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1995
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Edition: First Paperback Edition.
Number of Pages: 336
Condition Note: Clean, unmarked copy with some edge wear. Good binding. Dust jacket included if issued with one. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.
Publisher Description: 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.