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

• Author: Brisben, J. Quinn

The priest John Ball made a contribution in the form of a couplet to Wat Tyler's 1381 peasant revolt:

When Adam delved and Eve span, Who then was the gentleman?

Archaeologists worked out more than a century ago that the human species did not delve, that is, plow, for the great majority of its time on this planet, but this work was almost certainly done by males, as it still is in surviving peasant cultures. That's because it is not compatible with attending to the needs of small children.

In Women's Work, Elizabeth Wayland Barber proves with some elegance that women were spinning many millennia before men were plowing, and that much of the history of this activity and of the women who did it is recoverable with tools now available.

Cloth generally does not survive the ravages of time, as anyone can easily tell by looking at museum exhibits of Nineteenth Century clothing side-by-side with restored replicas.

Bone needles, however, survive, as do beads of shell and other materials which were, obviously, once arranged on strings. Barber has examined a small Gravettian "Venus" figure carved from bone more than 20,000 years ago, found near the area and the time of the famous Lascaux cave paintings. The figure wears a string skirt.

Barber, with the practiced eye of an experienced cloth-maker, notices that the frayed ends of the strings prove it's definitely made of twisted fibers, not hide or animal sinews. The skirt, which hangs only from a hip band and only from the buttocks, is obviously not designed to protect anyone from cold. Like much clothing worn today, it seems designed to proclaim the status and condition of the wearer. Barber's supposition, supported by sound logic and common sense, is that it advises of a woman's availability for childbearing.

Textiles are a byproduct of the greatest revolution in human history, the one that began in Western Asia about 10,000 years ago and has been replicated in other places since. This revolution turned humans from food gatherers to food producers and began a race between expanding population and finite resources--a race whose outcome is still in doubt. The increased food supply was balanced for a long time by the increased rate of death from disease caused by humans' living in relatively confined spaces for relatively long periods.

Barber postulates that these conditions resulted in more frequent pregnancies and, simultaneously, more time for developing new spinning and weaving techniques. Like food...