REPORTING FROM BEIJING +15

Clare Winterton is currently attending the Beijing +15 conference in New York (lucky lady!). She sent us a quick recap of three moments of inspiration from the New York Commission on the Status of Women Global NGO Forum (the warm up to Beijing +15), which she attended over the weekend:

1. Cai Yipping from China, the Executive Director of Isis International: “We must speak the language of women and transform it into policy. To be good communicators we must listen with passion, for the history of the women’s movement continues to be written here in this forum.”
2. Dr Sima Samar’s rallying cry: “We have to break boundaries, we have to be united. We have to know we are part of a global female body…We are here to make a better space for our daughters and our grand-daughters and our job is not yet finished!”
3. Gertrude Mongella (President of the Pan-African Parliament) on the coming-of-age of the Beijing treaty: “At 15 years we are at a different stage of life – old enough to bear children and old enough to prepare for majority. Now we need to ask, how mature has the world become?”

Stay tuned for more from Clare and Beijing +15!

QUESTION OF THE DAY: From Beijing +15

This year marks the 15th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women (held in Beijing, China, in 1995), when 189 member states adopted the Beijing Declaration and Platform for action, laying out a comprehensive agenda for women’s political and economic empowerment. To commemorate “Beijing,” the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women are meeting on March 1-12 in New York to review what progress has been made on women’s and girls’ rights since 1995.

I.M.O.W. Executive Director Clare Winterton and Board Chair Elizabeth Colton are currently attending the "Beijing +15" conference in New York. They were both intrigued by the following question, asked by a young woman from the New York YWCA at the Global NGO Forum:

Where are the new leaders, where are the new voices and where are the young women [in the global women’s movement]? When will the girl-child be able to speak for herself?

What do you think? Any comments on how we at I.M.O.W. can support and advance a new generation of women’s leadership and voices.

Rites of Passage

A Mundan ceremony is a Hindu rite where children, both girls and boys, have their first haircut. The shorn hair symbolizes the shedding of a past life.

What ceremonies and practices come to mind when you think of rites of passages? Bat or Bar Mitzvahs? Weddings? Childbirth? For millions of women, female genital mutilation (FGM) is a critical part of a young woman’s passage into adulthood.

Amnesty International estimates that two million procedures are carried out per year, primarily executed in 28 African countries. FGM can result in long term health consequences such as HIV infection, infertility, reproductive tract infections, and in some cases death by excessive bleeding.

The IMOW Team sat in on a United Nations Population Fund luncheon on Wednesday, which honored Ugandan activist Beatrice Chelangat for her work in fighting this inhumane practice through her organization, REACH (Reproductive, Educative and Community Health project). Chelangat has so far avoided the procedure herself. She told the audience of several American activists that, as a result, she has received death threats by males in her community, and has been forced to live her life in the presence of bodyguards.

I was also interested to learn about male rites of passages. Though circumcision is practiced on men in countries around the world, other cultures pressure men into different, lesser-known--and often life-threatening--ceremonies.

For example, in Pentecost, a small South Pacific island, young men participate in “Land Diving”: an annual jump from a tower with vines acting as a kind of bungee cord. And in the Brazilian Amazon, the Satere-Mawe tribe has their young men place gloves on their hands filled with excruciatingly painful stinger ants. They must endure the pain 20 times in a row.

But when it comes to endangering the reproductive health of millions of women around the world, how can FGM continue as a female rite of passage?

Every Penny Counts, Alina Chau

Welcome to the Refreshed, Renewed, Reenergized I.M.O.W. Blog!

Hello out there, and welcome to the new, revamped International Museum of Women blog! Here, we will highlight and discuss issues, news, art and events that are important to women around the world.

Tell us what you think in the comments section, or send us an email at team@imow.org.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Advice to market women – Italy c.1320

Clio recently stumbled across an interesting document from early fourteenth-century Italy which provides advice for market women and other women in business. In translation, here is what it says:

“If you’d be a market-woman
Don’t put green leaves on musty fruit,
Nor place the best fruit in front,
Nor grease figs to make them ripen,
Nor keep them in water to fool people.
Don’t buy bread, bran, or wine,
Nor salt, nor oil, nor salted meat
From menservants who’ve pilfered it …
If you’re a poultry or cheese-seller
Don’t wash the eggs or cheese
So they look fresher to customers.”
…
“If you want to be a saleswoman
Tell the truth to all
Make your claims true,
And don’t be deceiving women
Who don’t know what jewels are worth,
Don’t talk about others’ business with them …
If you’re an innkeeper, a waitress or barmaid,
Sell your goods and not your person,
If you’re at all attractive
Don’t make this part of the merchandise.”

Clio finds this fascinating – obviously the impulse to present merchandise under false pretenses, or to cheat customers has been around for centuries and, of course, dishonesty has never been restricted to one sex. This advice, coming from a male author, clearly intends to promote honesty in business transactions but also, in the case of some of the women to whom it is addressed, to separate the seller who works for gain in public space from concerns about potential personal immorality.

Do you readers know of other examples of published advice directed at businesswomen in other cultures, especially from earlier centuries? If so, please comment on this blog and share what you’ve found.

Source: Francesco da Barberino, Francesco da Barberino. Reggimento e costumi di donna [c. 1320], ed. G. E. Sansone (Rome, 1995); as translated in Mary Rogers & Paola Tinagli, Women in Italy, 1350-1650. Ideals and Realities: A Sourcebook (Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 259.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Clio introduces Selma Lagerlöf, Nobel Prize for Literature 1909

www.sweden.se

Selma Lagerlöf as a girl

Just over a hundred years ago, a Swedish writer named Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940) received the Nobel Prize for Literature. She was the first woman in the world to be recognized for her literary contributions. A few years later she became the first woman elected to the Swedish Academy. The University of Uppsala had already honored her with an honorary doctorate. Who was this woman?

www.nobelprize.org

Selma Lagerlöf as a Nobel laureate

Selma Lagerlöf was a prodigious and popular writer of stories and novels. Her works appeared in translation in many other languages besides Swedish and English. After giving up her work as a teacher, she traveled widely and drew from her experiences in other lands, including Italy, Egypt and the Holy Land. One of her best known works was The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, published in 1907, a fanciful story about a miniature boy who flew all over Sweden on the back of a gander, learning the geography of his country and encountering many wonderful creatures. She also wrote long novels, beginning with Gösta Berlings Saga (1891), and including Jerusalem (1901-1902), about a group of peasants who moved to Jerusalem for religious reasons, but were conflicted about having left their farms in Sweden.

Lagerlöf was by no means the first celebrated woman writer in Swedish history. Indeed, the first Swedish novel, Hertha (1855), by Fredrika Bremer, had attacked the laws – the system of patriarchal guardianship over daughters embodied in Sweden’s ‘Paternal Statutes” of 1734. This novel made such an impression, that the government modified those paternal statutes in 1858, and in 1872 changed them again to acknowledge the full legal emancipation of unmarried Swedish women at the age of twenty-five. Sometimes literary works can have a vast impact on social institutions and Bremer’s writings certainly did. So did those of Selma Lagerlöf.

One of Selma Lagerlöf’s most important post-Nobel speeches was given in June 1911to the congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, meeting in Stockholm. Entitled “Home and State” [Hem och Stat in Swedish], she presented her case for woman suffrage: Women, she said, want to help men change the state into a home for the nation. Swedish women did obtain the vote before many others.

The Nobel prize brought Selma Lagerlöf a vast amount of money. She used that money to buy back the family estate Mårbacka, in the Värmland, near Lake Vanern in the southern part of Sweden. It had been sold in 1885 following her father’s death, to Lagerlof’s great regret. The author had drawn deeply on the oral history and folk tales of this region in many of her writings. There, in the Värmland, “women were still the preservers of tradition and performed the family’s storytelling. . . mythical notions were still alive” (Delblanc, p. 12). To her, this place was a spiritual as well as a physical home.

This very successful authoress was also very generous to others. One author (Berendsohn, p. 31-32) wrote of her in 1931: “Selma Lagerlöf gives away a great part of her income, not only to relieve distress far and wide, but to further cultural and scientific purposes…. She has given large sums towards the cutting of a canal and the improvement of the roads. To a ‘Gosta Berling Fund’ for elderly and needy authoresses she devoted all the proceeds of the ‘Gosta Berling’ film. It is not without reason that she is accounted as a good fairy in her home country.”

Superbly talented, honored, gracious, and generous – these words epitomize this superb Swedish writer, who overcame a crippling childhood deformity to become a great figure in world literature.


To learn more about Selma Lagerlöf:

Vivi Edström. Selma Lagerlöf. Translated by Barbara Lide. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

Walter A.Berendsohn. Selma Lagerlöf: Her Life and Work. Adapted from the German by George F. Timpson, with a preface by V. Sackville-West. London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson Ltd., 1931.

Sven Delblanc. Swedish Portraits: Selma Lagerlöf. Published by the Swedish Institute, 1986.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Solving the Paid Work-Family Conflict for Women

There has been a great deal of stir in the American media lately about how women who work for pay and are mothers can balance career and family, without an extended family – or a village – to help out. One solution proposed is “Getting to 50/50” in the household, with husbands and fathers taking more responsibility for raising children and sharing household work.

During the last two centuries other solutions for the rearrangement of domestic economy have been proposed. Clio brings to your attention one of these, a communal, cooperative solution that later inspired the kibbutz system in Israel. Early in the nineteenth century, the utopian thinker Charles Fourier elaborated such a system at great length. His ideas were taken up by many others. One of the more successful experiments of this type took place in France – the Familistère at Guise (Aisne), under the direction of a disciple of Fourier, Jean-Baptiste Godin.

Jean-Baptiste Godin (1817-1888) had made a fortune in ironworking. He was the founder and guiding spirit of the most important French worker-city and industrial complex, which he established in northeastern France in 1859, based on Fourierist principles. The Familistère supported its activities through pioneering the manufacture of cast-iron stoves. The facilities included hundreds of family lodgings, stores, a restaurant, a workingmen’s club, a library, covered courtyards, vast gardens and agricultural plots, professional and primary schools, and a nursery for infants and pre-school children. It was among the first planned communities.

Many visitors from other European countries and North America attested to the success of the project, which lasted until 1968, when it was acquired by a German firm. It is now open as a tourist attraction.

In this published letter to Theodore Stanton (son of the American suffrage leader, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and compiler of an important work on the woman question in Europe, Godin describes the arrangements made at the Familistère to free women for productive labor through the socialization of household labor and childcare.

This is Godin’s description, as translated and published in Stanton’s essay on France in The Woman Question in Europe (New York & London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1884), pp. 307-309.

“The foundation of the Familistère reposes on principles which are a synthesis of the practical ideas forced upon the attention of the world by the St. Simonian, phalansterian and communistic schools of the early part of this century. But it is above all for women and children that our creation at Guise has proved a happy event. The Association of the Familistère is, I think, the only institution which has, up to the present time, put into practice respect for the rights of women, who are treated as the equal of men in all the affairs of life. This idea of the equality of the sexes was borrowed from Fourier. The Familistère could not change the laws of French society, but as members of the Association, women enjoy all the rights of men. They may aspire to all the honors at the disposal of the Association; they are electors and eligible [Ed.: to run for office]; they may form a part of all committees and councils. They perform these duties with faithfulness, and have shown themselves inaccessible to cabal, which has not always been the case with the men.

“In order that women may profit by the social liberty to which the present current of ideas is leading them, a change must be made in the system of family life: domestic economy must be modified and perfected. The emancipation of women will remain in the domain of speculation, as long as our institutions and customs impose on the father and mother the entire responsibility of the care of the family. The Familistère has solved this problem by assuming the bringing up of the children from the moment of their birth, so that the mother has to bestow on them only her milk and caresses, and the family, its tenderness and affection. But even in the absence of mother and family the children are not neglected. They always receive the closest attention. At every stage of their growth the children are under the eye of the Association. Separated into nine divisions in nine different rooms, each division has its nurses and teachers, who give instruction in keeping with the age of their pupils. In this way the mother and father can confer on their offspring the delights of family life, without inflicting on them, at the same time, any of its discomforts. The care and education of the children – which are the same for both sexes – being thus assumed by the Association, the duties of maternity are reduced to nursing during the early months of the child, and the mother is not hindered from attending to her other occupations. Women, therefore, find themselves emancipated, in so far as they desire it, from one of the most monopolizing obligations; they recover their liberty and may devote themselves to work and culture.

“In order to introduce this innovation, it is indispensable that the isolated habitation give place to the common dwelling, the phalanstery or social palace, so that the bringing up of children may be made a distinct organized part of the family system. The commune, therefore, must be architecturally reformed, and all the common household duties be placed in proximity to the home. It is necessary, furthermore, to bring about the division of domestic labor; to establish for the children a nursery, infant schools, primary schools, etc; to organize kitchens, laundries, public halls, etc. Only in this way is it possible to reconcile household duties and family cares with the exercise, on the part of women, of civil and political rights and lucrative employments.”

Clio wants to hear your views on the Familistère solution. Do you think it is possible still in our own time? Can a solution like this work in other parts of the world? What are the essential elements? Must the community be relatively small? What, indeed, do women want, especially mothers who also seek economic independence and fulfilling work outside the home?


Suggested further reading:

Theresa M. McBride, “Socialism and Domesticity: The ‘Familistère’ at Guise,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 19 (1981), pp. 45-46.

Solutions Sociales de J. B. A. Godin, ed. J. F. Rey and J. L. Pinol (Quimperle: La Digitale, 1980; orig. publ. 1871).

On the Web: http://www.familistere.com

CLIO TALKS BACK: What is women’s work?

What is “women’s work”? Is it primarily mothering and housework, as some would still have us think?

Let’s look at the impact of industrialization. How many of you out there are aware that the work of women is central to what we understand as the “industrial revolution”? How many people know that as textile production (spinning and weaving) was first mechanized in early 19th century Europe, that women were eagerly sought after as employees in textile mills and became the most visible, and the most criticized of industrial employees (because their labor was cheap and their presence in the workforce highly visible).

How many of you appreciate that the beginnings of the industrial production of foodstuffs, of industrial canning, for example, dramatically changed what women had to do in households. How many people realize that this process is still going on – as, for example, in rural Mexico and other parts of the countryside in Latin America, where the traditional grinding of corn by hand on the metate is being superceded by the advent of the electrical grinder or mill? How many other forms of “women’s work” around the world – hauling water, hauling wood or brush for fires, etc., tending poultry, growing fruits and vegetables – are being altered irrevocably by electric power and mechanical devices, not to mention running water? What forms of work replace these customary, age-old women’s chores?

What difference did it make in these chores if a woman were born poor or rich? What if a woman was a servant – or a slave? Or a queen? What if she had children? Or, what if she had none? What have women gained from this process of economic transformation? What have women lost?

Women have always “worked”; the question is what value has been placed on their contributions, and who decides what that value is. And how does it change over time?

Clio

CLIO TALKS BACK: Albanian woman entrepreneur make good: meet Donika Mici

Juli Siri, rephotographed by Clio

Donika Mici and her staff - 1996

Clio has been traveling lately, both through time and space. A recent article about a path-breaking entreprenurial woman from Albania caught her attention. It appeared in the International Herald Tribune (The Global Edition of the New York Times).

In the spirit of I.M.O.W.’s newly-launched online exhibit, “Economica: Women and the Global Economy,” Clio presents a woman making history in the business world today by defying convention and “thinking otherwise.” Her name is Donika Mici. She lives in Albania and her company makes shoes for the export trade.

Here is her story, as told by Dan Bilefsky of the New York Times:

“Donika Mici has braved decades of dictatorship, the burning down of one of her factories, a near-civil war and a mother-in-law who thought she would be better off in the kitchen than running a fashion empire.

“Now, however, Ms. Mici, 47, chief executive of DoniAnna, the largest shoe manufacturing business in Albania, says the time has come for Albania Inc. to shed its outmoded image and overcome the hurdles of the past.

“While other shoe exporters produce at least part of their shoes in nearby Italy so they can gain the cachet of a “Made in Italy” label, Ms. Mici makes shoes only in Albania and proundly insists that a “Made in Albania” label is no longer an impediment to success.

“DoniAnna boasts an enviable client list of retailers, from mass-market chains like Macy’s and Bata to specialists like Aldo and Kenneth Cole. The company had sales of more than €14 million, or $20.4 million, in the first six months of this year. It employs about 1,400 workers and exports to more than a dozen countries, including Italy, the United States and France.

“’You have to be very, very tough to succeed in this country, because we started with nothing after communism fell in 1990,’ said Ms. Mici, a down-to-earth mother of one, whose main concessions to fashion are Versace glasses and a train of Chihuahuas following her on DoniAnna’s sprawling factory floor.

“’Now, Albania is heading in the right direction to become a modern European country and there is no turning back,’ she said. . . .

“Assuming the economy remains relatively stable, Ms. Mici said Albania’s potential resided in a low-cost and hard-working work force that, she argued, made the country an attractive manufacturing center. She added that Albania had the potential to become an outsourcing alternative to China and India.

“’We have low wages, and we do not skimp on quality,’ she said, rubbing her painted fingernails over a stack of brown cowhide leather. ‘And while it can take six months for a manufacturer in Bangalore to fill an order for a European shoe retailer, Albania’s location means it takes only 30 days for my shoes to go from factory floor to a shelf in London or Paris.’

‘The daughter of an army officer and a chef, Ms. Mici started DoniAnna in 1992 – a time, she recalled, when Albania was still so isolated that microwave ovens were unattainable and she was the only woman driving a car in Tirana. With no credit available from a then-nonexistent banking sector, she teamed up with an Italian investor. Within a few years, she was producing a million pairs of shoes a year and exporting across the world.

“The stress was unbearable, she recalled, not least because she was a woman in an abidingly macho society. When she showed up for meetings with male suppliers, she said, they would routinely ask her to see the boss. ‘I’m a pioneer in this country because I was one of the first people, never mind women, to set up a private business after communism fell,’ she said. ‘My husband’s family were not happy, but I hired a nanny and someone to cook and clean and iron his clothes. I told my husband, the system has changed and these are the new rules.’

“Building an export-oriented company from scratch also proved difficult, she said, in a nascent democracy where regulations governing everything from customs duties to safety did not exist.

“In March 2008, when a former military ammunition depot exploded in Gerdec, a village northwest of Tirana, killing 26 people, DoniAnna’s nearby factory was burned to the ground, causing more than €1 million worth of damage.

“’My company could be five times bigger but all of these hurdles slowed me down,’ she said. . . .

Clio says: We can all learn from courageous women like Donika Mici, whose drive and determination can inspire other women to take that entrepreneurial leap. Are you one of them? Think hard about the project you would like to launch….. and then do it!


Source: Excerpted from Dan Bilefsky, “Struggling to help a country heal: Albanian entrepreneurs lead effort to throw off a long and troubled history,” International Herald Tribune (The Global Edition of the New York Times) 3-4 October 2009, 15-16.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Cows (and Women) Rule!

photo by Clio - from L'Eau, source de vie: Tricentennaire des bains de la Lenk (1989), p. 10

Wyberschlacht -- the Lenk women

In the Simmental, a lovely valley in the Alps of the Bernese Oberland, in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, cows rule.

Grazing on the lush green sloping pastures of the Alps, they provide an unsurpassed, healthy milk that is made into many products, most notably the local Alpkäse, or Alp cheese.

Cows are everywhere, even next door and walking down the road. The sound of the cows’ bells provides a soothing serenade to visiting hikers and locals alike. The Swiss celebrate the cows' contributions with flower garlands as they wend their way, in spring and fall, to and from the high Alpine pastures. For centuries, cows have been the very backbone of life for the people of this area.

Many of you have heard of the world-renowned Emmenthaler cheese. The Simmental Alp cheese tastes just as good, but has no holes. It is solid through and through, like the beautiful, belled (mostly brown and white) cows that produce its milky source. Like great wine or whiskey, it gets tastier with age.

Producing excellent Alp cheese is an art, and the best is sold from cellars up in the mountains (usually near a mountain restaurant).

Cows and farms and dairying go a long ways back in the history of Lenk, the town at the end of the Simmental. In fact, the principal historical legend concerning Lenk has to do with women and cows. In this case, it was about women defending their cows from marauding cattle thieves.

The town’s coat of arms proudly displays a crossed sword and spindle, honoring the heroism of the women of Lenk in the Women's Battle.

photo by Clio

Lenk coat-of-arms (Wappen)

This is the story as told by the Lenkers:

The inhabitants of Lenk are proud of their women. According to the saga, around 1530, on the Langermatte [a steep mountain in front of the massive, stark and craggy mountains in this area], the women of Lenk delivered a devastating defeat to cattle thieves from the Valais [on the other side of the mountains]. Lacking weapons -- the men had left home with their arms to fight in the wars of religion [associated with the Reformation] – the women did not hesitate. They seized on scythes, hayforks, and axes and went after the invaders. They were defending their very livelihood, their cows – the base of their economy. And they did not let up in their struggle until all the would-be cattle rustlers were dead.

The legend of the Women’s War, the so-called “Wyberschlacht” on the Langermatte, is alive and well. A memorial, “Bi de Tote” at the site of the battle suggests how violent the battle must have been. The spindle and sword in Lenk’s coat of arms commemorate these fearless women. Still today the men of Lenk honor these women’s heroic deeds by stepping aside to let them enter the church first.

Source: This legend, or saga, is widely known in Lenk. Clio encountered it first on an informational sign posted by the local Tourist Office. It is told and retold in various publications since the early 1800s, including Georg Küffer, Lenker Sagen (1916) and Die Lenk in alter Zeit (1978).

CLIO TALKS BACK: Clio’s guest blog on “the string revolution”

W. W. Norton/Burckhardt Studio

Cover: Women's Work - The First 20,000 Years

Women got busy producing things that they thought they needed even before money or trade or the global economy existed. One of the first items they produced was string and eventually woven textiles.

Clio’s guest blog today features Elizabeth Wayland Barber. Her book, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (1994), brims over with insights about the revolutionary invention of string. She even proposes that if nineteenth-century scientists had thought to name prehistorical periods with an eye on women’s work and the vital (though extremely perishable) goods they produced, instead of focusing their naming on men’s more durable inventions (Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age, etc.), that we might long ago have acknowledged this extraordinary invention as what she has named “The String Revolution.”

Why did we have to wait until the late twentieth century to recognize the vast importance of this very early contribution to human development?

Here is what Elizabeth Wayland Barber has to say about “the String Revolution”:

“Some four thousand years ago, at the beginning of the last phase of the Old Stone Age (called the Upper Palaeolithic), human beings began to act very differently from the way they ever had before. For some two million years they had fashioned simple stone tools, and for half a million they had controlled fire and hunted cooperatively in groups. But four thousand years ago, as the great ice sheets that had covered the northern continents retreated by fits and starts, humans started to invent and make new things at a tremendous rate. . . .

“These newly creative hunter-gatherers produced novel tools – such as awls, pins, and various chisellike burins – but they also began to sculpt animals, people, and other information (possibly calendrical) on pieces of ivory and bone and to make quantities of beads for adornment. . . Just as important, and more to our purpose here, these ancesters invented string and sewing and thus provided the first chapter in the story of women’s long association with the fiber crafts. . . While others were painting caves or knapping fancy flints, some genius hit upon the principle of twisting handfuls of little weak fibers together into long, strong thread. . . . 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. Soft, flexible thread of this sort is a necessary prerequisite to making woven cloth.. . .

“So powerful, in fact, is simple string in taming the world to human will and ingenuity that I suspect it to be the unseen weapon that allowed the human race to conquer the earth, that enabled us to move out into every econiche on the globe during the Upper Palaeolithic. We could call it the String Revolution. . . .

“Hence the first craft other than chipping stone blades and carving wooden implements (another perished product) and the first important craft not dangerous to the children must have been the fashioning of objects of and with string and fibers. We have no direct record of who did what chores in that distant time, but we will not be far off in surmising that the women were already involved in this innocuous task while they tended their toddlers around camp. . . .

“String seems such a simple, almost inevitable invention, yet its appearance was a momentous step down the road of technology. Invented early, it was known worldwide. Weaving, on the contrary, is much more complicated and may have been thought up only once, much too late to spread with humankind. Many cultures were still ignorant of it as this century [20th] began.”

Source: Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), pp. 42-43, 45, 54, 70.