b"\\u201cWomen spent so much time in the ancient world spinning, like they spent all their time, any spare moment. And spinsters were not bad, it wasn't bad to be a spinster the way we think of it, spinsters were, you know, respected members of households, single women who didn't have the responsibilities of husbands or children, who could spin more, and make money. And, you know, you think about things like marauding around when they sailed across the Atlantic and their little hats and everything, but you don't think about the sails. You don't think like, who made those sails? Who made the thread that made all those sails? Who do you think did that? How many years did it take those women to make one lousy sail, you know, I mean, it took two years of women's labor to make a sail. So the kind of invisible labor of women in all of that\\u2026\\u201d\\nSo says, Peggy Orenstein, a celebrated journalist who is acclaimed for her insightful analysis of gender, sexuality, and identity issues. She\\u2019s written several best-sellers about the topic, including Girls & Sex and Boys & Sex. But that\\u2019s not what we\\u2019re going to talk about today. During COVID, Peggy took a right turn, and an entirely different type of book emerged, one that is actually just as radical. In Unraveling, she explores the depths of her grief and tackles societal issues through the process of making a sweater from scratch\\u2014including shearing a sheep and carding and dying the wool\\u2014ultimately discovering the power of creativity and connection.\\nWhile sharing her journey of making the sweater, which is actually riveting, she also unravels the rich history and culture of spinning and weaving while exposing the sobering reality of fast fashion and its detrimental impact on our environment. This is a book about something that sounds simple, yet is actually about everything, offering the potential for a genuine shift in how we perceive the world.\\xa0\\n\\nMORE FROM PEGGY ORENSTEIN:\\nUnraveling: What I Learned about Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater\\nBoys & Sex: Young Men on Hook-Ups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity\\nGirls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape\\nDon\\u2019t Call Me a Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex and Life\\nCinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of New Girlie-Girl Culture\\nPeggy Orenstein\\u2019s Website\\nFollow Peggy on Instagram and Twitter\\n \\nTo learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy\\n \\n Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices"