This was a really good book. I tore through it in less than a day. It was a great look at the history of fabric creation (weaving and spinning) through prehistory to Classical Greece. It talked about textile technologies, fashions, and the role of women in both. Recommended. ( )

Fasinating and informational. Reading this book gave me a connection to all women before me. I can't wait to try weighted loom weaving. ( )

http://amiralace.blogspot.com/2007/12... ( )

I totally wrote a book review on this in community college:
west civ 101 10:30 am
Book Review
Spinning and weaving are as old (or older) than civilization itself. This book mainly investigates women and the craft of weaving textiles from the time of the Neolithic through Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, Hellenistic Greece, and up to the Romans. The book discusses why weaving became a women’s chore and illustrates what a commmerically viable task it was.
The first chapter of Women’s Work is dedicated to explaining the processes of spinning and weaving. This explanation is essential to understanding the technical merits of the craft. This chapter however was confusing. A clear picture of the tools and their placement during the process did not form in my mind. This lead to further confusion since the tools discussed in chapter one were referrenced heavily. More illustrations would have been helpful. Throughout the book, Barber uses a variety of methods to gather information on a very scarce object. Ancient textile work is perishable. Most of it doesn’t survive for study throughout the centuries. Clay spindle whorls, and loom weights have a history of being looked over by archelolgists. Wetting bowls in Egypt solved the problem of keeping flax wet and still while spinning. Women’s tools such as these were often misunderstood, or destroyed in the search for gold. This required the author to collect from varied sources; linguistics, reconstruction, mythology, and artwork featuring clothing and women working. Barber relies heavily on the works of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, to draw conclusions about Greek life. Sometimes it seems Barber references these works a little too much. Some theories sound like she thought of them as she was typing, but they make sense.
Thousands of years ago, in Neolithic villages women’s roles were tasks that were safe for small children to be around (cultivating gardening plots). Women, first of all, were life givers and caretakers of the young. Any additional tasks were secondary. Farming gradually grew beyond small graden plots to incorporate larger plots of land and equipment. It was no longer condusive to small children. Providing the textiles and cloth needed by the household became the women’s chore. Spinning was the most time consuming. Many ancients scenes from daily life depict a women with a spindle whorl. If young toddlers and newborns needed attention, the work was easily set aside and picked up again later.
The first “textile” work Barber mentions is that of knotted string skirts. The skirts are depicted on stone Venus fetility goddesses. Barber suggests if a girl wore one it signified instantly to others that she was of childbearing age. Clothes -before the advent of writing and even after- communicated instantly one’s place in society. Just by looking at the textile and its color one would know if a women was married, if a man was a solider, and if one was wealthy or a leader. Purple was the royal color in Rome because it was extremely hard to obtain. It came from a coastal snail. Only one drop of the dye was yielded from squeezing the snail to death. The poor species was quickly harvested to extinction.
One of the most interesting chapters was titled Cloth for Caravans (chapter 7). It discussed the trade of textiles and tin in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. Women and their husbands often worked together (almost as equals) in the family business. Women would supervise the weaving of the textiles and manage the home. The men would travel in caravans, as far as Anatolia, to trade their wares. It was fascinating to read the translated cunniform tablets from a wife to a husband concerning unpaid debts and other business topics.
Textiles were of great wealth and often used as a sort of currency in the days before coinage. Up through the centuries they have been sought after by those seeking to rise in the ranks of the social classes. “The English word robe comes from rob because clothing was one of the most frequent forms of plunder in the Middle Ages, as in many another time and place.” Spinning and weaving for thousands of years took up much of a women’s lifetime, it was a never-ending chore (and I thought laundry was annoying). Industrial clothing manufacture (only widespread for the last 100 years) freed future generations of women from this ancient labor. I did not realize until I started typing this review, how much I learned and retained from the book. It was a drag to read at the time, but upon reflection I did enjoy it. I do recommend the book for anyone who is interested in women’s history. ( )

The "untold" story of women, done with rigorous absence of speculation and direct application of scientific methods. Barber not only shows that "women spent most of their time raising young children and preparing the daily food and household cloth..." [294], but she shows Why and How, and Why this is important.

The author gets particular accolades for explaining her method, and then executing the work within scientific perameters so as to reveal actual facts of what people in previous times were doing. Not content with ignoring "work" for which there is little monumental evidence, she has found "data" in our physiology, the plants, myths, and language. With restraint on mere guesswork and speculation which is remarkable, Barber pieces together the role of women's work in the ancient communities. She is able to "explain"--objectively--why women did things that left almost no hard evidence: preparing food and weaving textiles. (For the 3 years of breast-feeding child care, it had to be work that could be interrupted and "safe"--unlike mining, carcass-rendering, stone-chipping and piling, or warfare, all of which tend to leave more obvious remains).

Barber takes us on a 20,000 year odyssey [283] to show us women working. In the Paleolithic period, the fiber crafts were connected to high social status and posed no danger to toddlers. Clothing, which became the "the next language after speech--unique in its ability to convey important information [if simple) continuously and relatively permanently".

With the advent of more settled life, the world changed. Cloth-making shifted from merely useful to essential, and finally commercial, importance as a commodity. By the start of the Late Bronze Age (2500 BC), women's textile work lost economic ground, while still busy with children.

As a scholar, Barber's work on "work" is particularly important not only for its rigor but its methodology in reconstructing what other scholars had dismissed as unreconstructable--the history of easily perishable commodities like textiles. Before Barber, apparently no one had bothered to reconstruct, and wear, a String Dress, or even a 2500 year old tartan. The woolen guide-string recovered from the caves of Lascaux is now considered part of the importance of the paintings.

The presentation is not wooden or theoretical-- it is delightful to re-read Homer and the Xenophon with Barber to re-visit the mystery of change and activity. Until recently, excavators would often throw away the remaining and scarce fiber, or assume the loom weights held little information.

Archeology did not become an investigative science until in 1898 a horrified WMF Petrie rushed in to glean from the remains of the smashing and burning ordered by Emile Amelineau at his excavation of Abydos. Known as the l'affaire Amelineau, the tomb raiders were deliberately trying to make their relics more valuable because "unique". And the world started to realize the value of SOCIAL information recovered from the Past. [288]

Ancient Texts are not only studied for the stories, the lessons, but also for the revealing etymologies. Barber is an accomplished linguist. The importance of "tunic", "shirt"[290], and "zone [zoster]" [66] not only to show the source of techniques and goods, but illustrates that Language is remarkably durable evidence even as messages perish as they are uttered [13, cf 66, 291, cautionary fn at 292].

Barber concludes with a careful examination of her methodology -- this is her great contribution. The techniques -- beginning with the technique for removal of "unwarranted assumptions"! [298] -- for finding the facts.

The INCLUSION of the facts about 1/2 the population in "history" turns out to be helpful answering virtually all the critical historical questions -- migration, source-points, influences, etc. For example, understanding the role of women--finding the artifacts of their presence, understanding their work--reveals whether migrants were "invaders" (men engaged in plunder or trade), or "colonizers" or settlers with entire families. For example, Egyptian records show "attackers" known as "PLST" settling around Gaza in 1200 BC. But the excavation of numerous crumbly clay donut weights tells us women had moved in. The sudden appearance of clay weights with little intrinsic "trade" value, far outside the early homeland of the warp-weighted loom, suggests the arrival of entire families from Europe via Anatolia. Thus, the earliest permanent settled inhabitants of the still-disputed Gaza of "Palestine" are likely to be Mycenaean Greeks.[294] {Not to say that wandering tribes, or even piratical coast-raiders, have no "territorial" legitimacy!} ( )