Exactly thirty years ago a book came out that changed the way we think about textiles and fibre and the role they’ve played in the human story. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber became a best seller. What she said was revolutionary. Until then people thought that textiles were a by-product of civilisations and that processes like weaving were around five or six thousand years old. Wayland Barber was the first person to understand that they are central to the development of human society, and she said, spinning and weaving were far older than we realised and went back to the beginnings of human social development. She coined the phrase The String Revolution and suggested the Stone Age would have been better called the Age of String.

Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s book: Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years with its radical ideas, put textiles at the heart of the human story. It played a major role in creating a new generation of expert textile archaeologists and in getting the subject taken seriously. She helped make it possible for them to search for ancient fibre and textiles and, crucially, to understand that what they were seeing wasn’t detritus or trash but something precious that has a great deal to tell us about human beings and what they are capable of. She was also one of the first people to give us a way to value the work of women in pre-historic societies.

To celebrate the book’s 30th anniversary a new edition has been published with an updated afterword by Wayland Barber. This episode of Haptic & Hue is devoted to a rare interview with Elizabeth Wayland Barber in which she tells us how she came to write the book in the first place and the ideas that lay behind it.

For more information about this episode and details of the discount on the book please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/

The American cotton feed sack is the stuff of legend. From the 1850s onwards it was skilfully repurposed by women across America into all kinds of garments and household goods. By the late 1930s when it became highly patterned, it's estimated that more than 3 million Americans were wearing feed sack clothing. Out of necessity, it was made into dresses and shirts, quilts and curtains, sheets, mattress covers, pyjamas, and even undergarments.

Today feed sacks are valued by collectors and makers in America, and there is a lively market in them. But these soft cotton sacks have a much wider story to tell us than that. They have played a role in creating one of the world’s legendary cricket teams, they have saved a nation from the brink of starvation and in this episode of Haptic & Hue, we tell the incredible story of how a flour sack re-united a family with the something created by the grandmother they lost in in the Holocaust.

For pictures of the feedsacks talked out in this episode and more information about the contributors please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/

An extraordinary quilt handstitched by convict women on board ship as they were transported from Britain to Australia in 1841 has just gone on display in a new exhibition at Australia’s National Gallery. Many of those who made the quilt were illiterate and led tough and impoverished lives. And yet these social outcasts and exiles - working in desperate circumstances - created one of the most important cultural artifacts in the colonial history of Australia.

The Rajah Quilt – named after the ship the women were transported on - has nearly 3,000 individual pieces. It is one of the only items made by convicts that survives from this part of Australia’s past, which was buried in shame for so long. The quilt gives us a rare chance to re-assess what it meant to be transported and to see how it has become an important part of Australia’s history and a powerful symbol of how many people first came to this country.

For more information, a full transcript and further links: https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/