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Elizabeth Wayland Barber Quotes

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Famous Elizabeth Wayland Barber Quotes

“Along the way I kept running across wonderful bits of information about the women - virtually always women - who produced these textiles and about the values that different societies put on the products and their makers. When I talked about my work, people seemed especially eager for these vignettes, stories that told of women's lives thousands of years ago.”

StoriesWomenTextilesPrehistorySocial HistoryEconomic HistoryWomen S Work
Book:Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times
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“Of course, being perishable, the textiles themselves are not easy to learn about -- just like most of the rest of women's products (such as food and the recipes for preparing it). Therefore, to recover the reality of women's history, we must develop excellent techniques ... using not just the obvious data but learning to ferret out every helpful detail. Practical experiments like reweaving some of the surviving ancient cloths are a case in point. Among the thousands of archaeologists who have written about pottery or architecture, how many have actually tried to to make a pot or build a building? Precious few; but with so much data available for study in these fields, scholars felt flooded with information already, and such radical steps hardly seemed necessary. Our case is different; we must use every discoverable clue.”

RecreationArchaeologyTextiles
Book:Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times
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