Weaving and decorating cloth, carpets and other fabric has traditionally been women's work in many cultures, ancient and modern. Embroidery, weaving and other textile arts have become today's women's art. Read about some of the long history of women's work and craft.
1. Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years; Women, Cloth, and Society...
by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. An exhaustive look at the role of women in weaving and the production of cloth -- and thereby in the establishment of civilization.
2. Embroidered Textiles: Traditional Patterns from Five Continents
By Sheila Paine. This book provides an identification guide, and focuses on the religious, mythological and cultural meanings behind the many designs of embroidery.3. Bauhaus Textiles: Women Artists and the Weaving Workshop
By Sigrid Weltge-Wortmann. A beautifully illustrated story of the women of the Bauhaus movement, a supposedly egalitarian modernist arts and crafts movement that nevertheless assumed that women artists would be most interested in weaving.4. The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an America
By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, also the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Midwife's Tale. She explores the earlier American nostalgia for yet an even earlier time -- the "Age of Homespun" -- and examines the realities and the myths of the production of such household items as cloth and furniture.5. Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry
A look at women's history for women in a particular culture, through examining their work -- how baskets woven by women reflect historical, social and environmental changes.6. Life Along the Silk Road
By Susan Whitfield. The lives of ordinary women and men on the route linking Europe with the Far East, before the 11th century. She tells the story of several individuals -- composites based on careful historical research -- in different places both geographically and economically. In the process, she conveys much about what life was like for women (and men) in that colorful time and place.7. Women, Art and Geometry in Southern Africa
By Paula Gerdes. The author looks at the crafts of women in South Africa, especially basket weaving, and the creative patterns that these women have invented. She then uses this connection to consider the future of women in Southern Africa in mathematics and geometry.8. Spider Woman: A Story of Navajo Weavers and Chanters
By Gladys Amanda Reichard. Originally published in 1934, this classic in anthropology details the experience and learning of a woman anthropologist who learned Navajo weaving techniques, and in the process, learned much about the life of women in the Navajo culture of the early 20th century.