In The Missing Thread, alongside the female stars of classical antiquity, like Sappho, Cleopatra, and Boudica, British classicist Daisy Dunn introduces us to a selection of arresting minor fiures: the swimmer who disabled ships during the Persian Wars, a painter and a historian (their works now lost), the Roman civil warrior Fulvia, and many more. But the book’s central contention—that women “shaped the course of ancient history” in “tangible ways”—brims with problems.
Dunn’s starting point, to which she keeps returning, that textile production allowed women the means to do creative and empowering work, finds little support in what we know or can infer about the millions of female slaves for instance, women are quoted telling the male head of their household that they resent working at a textile business he set up for them, while he does nothing.
