Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times
I’m learning about old things and ancient history this month, so this week’s book is Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times by Elizabeth Wayland Barber.
So, I have read this book before, but it’s been a while. And I know I referenced it pretty recently in one of my reviews, Craft: An American History, but what made me re-read this one now is actually last weeks book, when the author Robert Schoch mentioned something about pottery having what appeared to be textile imprints, and the pottery he referenced was like 7000 years old…I’m probably off on the dates he provided, but it immediately reminded me of this one and I knew there was a hell of a lot more textile history than there is pottery history. Basically, neither is prone to lasting long, pottery due to its breakable nature, textiles due to its biodegradability.
Wayland Barber opens by providing the importance of experimental archaeology, with one of her own experiments attempting to reweave a piece of tartan found in a salt mine in Hallstatt Austria, woven approximately 800 BCE. And after she got it strung on the loom and started weaving, realized she’d warped it wrong for ease of weaving. The way she had it warped on the loom was labor intensive and required about 8 hours just to warp the loom. But by rotating the weave 90 degrees in either direction, instead of a fussy warping of odd counts of sixteen, nineteen, twenty, eighteen of any given color, she would have an even warp of four threads each. Which makes a hell of a lot more sense with the time constraints of weaving. Especially under the KISS principle…Keep it Simple Stupid. Counts of four are easier to track than counts of sixteen, nineteen, twenty, eighteen.
And from there she proceeds to rebuild the known history of textiles…and it is a LONG history, going back at least 15,000 years, starting with spinning. And the way she explains it, it’s really easy to see how spinning was a simple start. You take a tuft of some fibrous something and roll it against your thigh. I would be hard pressed to think of any gen X kid who HASN’T done this with threads pulled off their jeans from the holes in the knees.
And once they figured out the making of thread, it wasn’t that big a leap to figure out that twisting MORE threads together could make a pretty strong rope. And they have found twisted ropes that have been dated to 15,000 years old.
What is interesting is she highlights belts made of string and their possible talismanic use to indicate a young girl’s ability to bear children, fertility, and sure, that’s possible. However, she mentions this after talking about how useful string was and my mind immediately leapt to a more functional purpose of a string belt: if you have a belt made of string, and you find yourself in need of string…you simply cut one off the belt and you’re ready to go. Now, it’s certainly possible for the string belt to serve two purposes, both the indication of fertility AND wholly functional. But she didn’t even mention the absolute functionality of a belt made of string.
And from the discovery of string, she explores the history of textiles, how weaving developed, the different types of looms, how those looms developed in various cultures, which cultures used floor looms versus standing looms, how different weaves developed, how different fibers, specifically animal fibers, developed, how different fibers are spun into different textures. And how all of this was discovered by women.
Why do we know it was discovered by women? A couple of reasons, starting with logic. Everything about early textiles says it was done by people able to be stationary, which would be women. Why were women stationary? When was the last time you saw a man breastfeed a child? And I’m not talking about the whackadoos who believe men can get pregnant. I’m talking about actual biology…. wherein only women can get pregnant, and thus only women can breastfeed. And since spinning, weaving, fabric dying, are all safer activities than, say, hunting. Or herding large animals. And in an age when children were routinely breastfed for two to three years, which helped mitigate frequent pregnancies.
So, women, who were in charge of the children when they were young, took care of creating the family textiles. And for literally thousands of years, women were in charge of textiles as an industry. Wayland Barber outlines this using historical records tracing from ancient Minoan culture, through Mycenean culture, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Europe, China…all of these are traced and for all of them, up until the advent of the iron age at approximately 800 BCE, women were in charge of textiles.
So, what happened in the iron age that shifted the majority of textile manufacture from women to men? Basically…. civilization. As cities grew, specialization grew. Food was more plentiful thanks to the advent of advanced agriculture, so men had to find something to do with themselves. So, they took a previously women centered industry and well, took it over. Just like men today, lacking anything better to do with themselves, have taken over being women.
Ok, that’s maybe a little snarky. But I’m kind of sensing a history repeats itself thing here.
Back to the book. This is not all supposition. She pulls from myth, as well as what little recorded history exists from way back then, to weave a story…pun intended, about the importance of women’s contribution to history and, via textiles, the development of civilization.
This book isn’t very long, but it is packed with information regarding women’s contribution to history, which is frequently overlooked in favor of the wars of conquest and history that is written largely by…well…men.
And it’s not that women didn’t contribute. Clearly, we did, since every single person on this planet was born of woman. It’s that up until the late 20th century, women were so busy raising the next generation, they didn’t really get to write about their contributions to history. So, historians like Elizabeth Wayland Barber are working on correcting that oversight.
I quite liked this book, although it is a very specific niche audience that it was targeted towards, namely history nerds and textile geeks. And that’s it for this week.
