Volume 44, Number 11 · June 26, 1997
Fruits of the Loom
By Mary R. Lefkowitz
Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times
by Elizabeth Wayland Barber
Norton, 334 pp., $13.00 (paper)
When Pythagoras' wife Theano was asked how she could ever become as renowned as her husband, she replied, quoting theIliad, 'by plying the loom and sharing his bed.' In the Iliad these words are spoken by Chryseis, the young woman captive who became Agamemnon's favorite concubine. The ancients, in short, seem not to have thought it surprising that the wife of a famous philosopher in the relatively settled world of the sixth century BC demanded of life little more than a woman captured in war might expect.
Review, 2743 words
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