What will life be like in the U.S. by 2034 if current trends in gender relations and gender politics continue? Women especially will be severely disadvantaged by verifiable trends in marriage, divorce, family life, and the military. Everyday life, and gender relations, in 2034 are viewed through the eyes of three couples at different stages of life. Men have been emasculated and women must carry the burden for domestic life, work life, and ever-higher taxes. The roles of the two genders have become so warped that everything from the family to the military has become dysfunctional. A better way of life in a fictional New Zealand is compared to a U.S. society that is becoming increasingly unsatisfying to individual citizens, particularly women. The book relates how President Midge Houston and a few trusted lieutenants struggle to change society, against great odds, to the benefit of both men and women.

"A fascinating history of…[a craft] that preceded and made possible civilization itself." —New York Times Book Review New discoveries about the textile arts reveal women's unexpectedly influential role in ancient societies. Twenty thousand years ago, women were making and wearing the first clothing created from spun fibers. In fact, right up to the Industrial Revolution the fiber arts were an enormous economic force, belonging primarily to women. Despite the great toil required in making cloth and clothing, most books on ancient history and economics have no information on them. Much of this gap results from the extreme perishability of what women produced, but it seems clear that until now descriptions of prehistoric and early historic cultures have omitted virtually half the picture. Elizabeth Wayland Barber has drawn from data gathered by the most sophisticated new archaeological methods—methods she herself helped to fashion. In a "brilliantly original book" (Katha Pollitt, Washington Post Book World), she argues that women were a powerful economic force in the ancient world, with their own industry: fabric.

A collection of papers focussing on the contributions made by archaeology to the understanding of society in Palestine in the Roman period. The papers enable the two ways of evidence to interact in an unprecedented way.

"In The Representations of Women in the Middle Kingdom Tombs of Officials Lubica Hudáková offers an in-depth analysis of female iconography in the decorative programme of Middle Kingdom non-royal tombs, highlighting changes and innovations in comparison to the Old Kingdom. Previously considered too uniform, the study represents the first systematic investigation of two-dimensional images of women and reveals their variability in space and time. Hudáková examines the roles appointed to women by analyzing how they are depicted in a variety of contexts. Taking into account their postures, gestures, garments, hairstyles, size of the body, age as well as attributes and tools used by them, along with the scene orientation, she traces diachronic and diatopic developments and regional traditions in the Middle Kingdom tomb decoration"--

Grave goods show that women were identified as weavers in the early Anglo-Saxon period, rather than specifically spinners, as occurs later. A key piece of weaving equipment found in migration era burials is the iron beater, shaped during this period like a sword. Spear shaped beaters appear later in the seventh century. This study is centred on a corpus of sword and spear shaped beaters not only from Anglo-Saxon England (centred on East Kent), but also from Norway, where the earliest examples are found and from Alamannia. Conclusions are drawn about the processes and social composition of textile production, including any separation of weaving and spinning, and discuss why tools associated with the women's task of weaving should be shaped as objects with masculine associations.

This workshop is a DARPA Speech Recognition and Natural Language Workshop.