- "So why is it, if women were so enslaved by textile work for all those centuries, that the spinning jenny and power loom were invented by a man and not a woman?" A young woman accosted me with this question after a lecture recently.
"Th[e] reason," to quote George Foster, writing about in pottery making, "lies in the nature of the productive process itself which places a premium on strict adherence to tried and proven ways as a means of avoiding economic catastrophe." Put another way, women of all but the top social and economic classes were so busy just trying to get through what had to be done each day that they didn't have excess time or materials to experiment with new ways of doing things. (My husband bought and learned to use a new word-processing program two years before I began to use it, for exactly these reasons. I was in the middle of writing a book using the old system and couldn't afford to take the time out both to learn the new one and to convert everything. I was already too deep into "production." Elsie Boulding elaborated: "[T]he general situation of little margin for error leading to conservatism might apply to the whole range of activities carried out by women. Because they had so much to do, slight variations in care of farm or dairy products could lead to food spoilage, production failure, and a consequent increase in already heavy burdens." The rich women, on the other hand, didn't have the incentive to invent laborsaving machinery since the work was done for them." pages 31 - 33
- "We don't know how early to date this great discovery - of making string as long and as strong as needed by twisting short filaments together. But whenever it happened, it opened the door to an enormous array of new ways to save labor and improve the odds of survival, much as the harnessing of steam did for the Industrial Revolution." page 45
- "The transient life-style of the Palaeolithic hunters and gatherers would have required such an at-need and on-the-spot approach to making string. If you have no settled home, you must carry all your possessions, so you tend not to acquire much - no more than absolutely necessary.. . . Acquisitiveness is a Neolithic invention." page 54
- Description of an early skirt:
"One of these skirts, made of woolen cords stained a rich brown by the acidic groundwater that preserved it, is complete; we can inspect its mode of manufacture. The thick plied cords that form the skirt were anchored by being woven through a narrow belt band, from which they hung down to a length of about fifteen inches. At the bottom they have been caught together by a twined spacing cord, which serves to keep them in order. Below that, the ends have been looped into an ornamental row of knots, making the bottom edge so heavy that the skirt much have had quite a swing to it, like the long, beaded fringe on a flapper's dance dress. The belt band on which all depends is so long that the skirt was worn wrapped around twice, rather low on the hips, and tied in the center front with the generous ends of the band." pages 56-57
- "In no case do the string skirts - whether Palaeolithic, Neolithic, or Bronze Age - provide for either warmth or modesty. In all cases they are woven by women. To solve the mystery of why they were maintained for so long, I think we must follow our eyes. Not only do the skirts hide nothing of importance, but if anything, they attract the eye precisely to the specifically female sexual areas by framing them, presenting them, or playing peekaboo with them." page 59
- "But soon an interesting symbiosis develops between the human and their favorite plants. When it ripens, wild grain breaks off very easily from the stalk it grew on (as anyone knows who has gotten a sock full of seeds just by walking through a field of tall, dry grass.) That is how the plant spreads its seeds to propagate. In the wild a seed that does not fall off the stalk easily is less likely than its more readily dehiscent neighbors to settle into a good spot to germinate, but conversely it is more likely to be sitting there waiting to be found when the human collector comes by. The varieties of grain thus select rapidly toward kinds that cling firmly to the stem, once people gathering and sowing seeds come into the equation." page 74
- "Since war did not yet constitute significantly more of a problem than it had in the Palaeolithic, the men did not have to stay home all the time simply for defense. (The rarity of warfare had to do with both the sparseness of the population and the lack of great difference between haves and have-nots.) We see families clustering their houses together into little villages for mutual aid and support, but fences, when present, seem to be designed more to keep sheep and children in than enemies - other than wolves - out." pages 84 - 85
- "What we know of Neolithic pigments and dyes suggests that most of them would not have survived a washing. So the sort of swirling body art and textile paint seen on the figurines would have been quite temporary, as in parts of Africa today." page 131
- "Why should this linen [under]garment have been borrowed into Europe just after the advent of wool?" - because wool is itchy. page 133
- Regarding ancient Egyptian cosmetics: "Both women and men regularly kept small chests or lidded baskets with an array of cosmetics, the most important of which were ointments to soften the skin (dried out by heat, dust, and frequent washing) and eye paint, which was used not only for beauty but to help prevent eye infections and destroy parasites. Finely ground green malachite, a particular favorite from 4000 BC on, consists of oxide of copper - lethal to both bacteria and fly eggs." pages 200 - 201
- "William Ward, in making a thorough study of Middle Kingdom women's titles, points out that "of all these professions, only the 'Gardner' and 'Winnower' worked outside the house and its subsidiary buildings. This points to the general observation that outside work in the fields, etc., was performed by men, including washing clothing." page 206
- "When a town or settlement was overwhelmed and looted, the men who survived the fighting were typically slaughtered, while the women and children were hauled away to become captive laborers." page 216
- "Not only do the women greatly outnumber the men, but the majority of the working women labored in the textile industry. Indeed, textiles for export must have been a main source of Aegean wealth. . . . by the Myceneans' own reckoning, we come up with some sixty tons of wool - a count that checks well against Knossos accounts of cloth made. For comparison, a bulky ski sweater today might contain a pound and a half of wool. Imagine spinning and knitting eighty thousand of them by hand in one season." page 216
- "Early on, because of the easy compatibility of clothmaking with child care, women had almost total responsibility for producing the cloth and clothing in their societies. But toward the end of the Bronze Age and in the Iron Age, references to male weavers turn up in increasing numbers. What has changed?
First, the connections between societies.
The men, in contrast with the women, appear linked with new types of cloth, new techniques, new equipment, all brought in from elsewhere. Nor do they weave for their own households. Wherever we get a good glimpse of them, they are weaving for cash profit, for prestige, or (and here the women join them) for a slave master's profit.
Novelty, prestige, and cash are remarkably closely intertwined." pages 257-258
- "By the start of the Late Bronze Age (mid-second millennium BC), however, the flood of new technological changes related to prestige demands began to overwhelm the traditional textile workers in certain societies. Women lost economic ground, sometimes enormous ground, to those who could afford to specialize in the new and different - to those men with some free time to experiment. Mothers were still too busy with uncontrolled pregnancy and children to play around with novel ideas. Only to the extent that the women's cloth recorded religious or historical information, as with the sacred dress woven for Athena, did the women then reap prestige for their work." page 285
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last updated Nov 20, 1998
