I think the subtitle and blurb oversold the "Female Power" part of this, when the book is primarily about cloth production and cloth trade, with a sideline into the advantages of sheep wool over goat wool. The first chapter was probably the strongest in terms of discussing the homosocial world surrounding cloth production, and its cultural impact. After that, Hayeur Smith was very cautious about suppositions, and I don't feel like I came away knowing much more about women's roles other than as it pertained directly to spinning and weaving. There was some talk about Norse women in Greenland recycling clothes more, and experimenting with tighter weaves as the Little Ice Age set in, but that was the extent of the sociology. A lot of that discussion was also quite technical, and I think would've landed better with someone into fibre arts.

I'm making this all sound very dry, and to some extent it was (I may have skimmed some of the extended descriptions of artifact thread counts); however, I did like a lot of the conversation around archaeology. Hayeur Smith talks quite a bit about the challenges of dating cloth, especially when feeding the sheep seaweed apparently throws out all your dates, and also engages in some academic infighting with past theories about the history of Greenland settlements. These perhaps provide an explanation as to why the author's own speculation is so limited. We meet an archaeologist who decided because a hat reminded him of one found in 1550s Europe, it must have been traded with them, misdating the entire dig by several hundred years. Another person decided that because they'd found yarn in a bunch of Inuit sites that the Inuit must have traded extensively with the Norse in Greenland, because of course the Inuit didn't know how to spin (they did, actually).

Overall, interesting, but probably more so to yarn nerds.