When Olive Schreiner (d. 1920) asked the question ‘the woman who is only a woman, what has she but her needle?’ in her posthumously published novel From Man to Man; Or Perhaps Only, she positioned clothwork as the expressive tool of the culturally ostracised and limited. She identified in women's ‘invisible stitching’ the artistic endeavour of those excluded from the male-dominated provinces of poetry, painting, and philosophy: the ‘voiceless expression’ of those prohibited from the masculine prerogative of verbal and linguistic articulation. Schreiner highlighted that in those stitched objects, fabrics, and cloths so overlooked as cultural artefacts, we can find written ‘all the passion of some woman's soul’, the hopes and desires of a womankind that has been systemically marginalised and disregarded, should we learn how to read them. The founder of the Irish Sisters of Charity in 1815, Mary Aikenhead (d. 1858), similarly described female clothwork as the province of the ‘ignorant’ in her writing. Whether the product of internalised misogyny or uttered with a more knowing awareness that a greater spiritual potential might be found in textile work, Aikenhead's statement sets up an opposition between Latin (male-authored) scripture and (female) clothwork as devotional domains and outlets. It illustrates a connection between women's relegation in the working of fabric, their marginalisation in theological discourses, and subjugation to mere obedience within Catholic ecclesiastical culture, as equally defined by androcentrism concerning vocality as the artistic vocations bemoaned by Schreiner.