There is so much to take from Beverly Gordon’s expansive compendium of information, and I found myself a little overwhelmed at times by the sheer amount of facts presented to illustrate the diverse applications of textiles. Despite the sometimes clinical demonstration of information, Gordon ultimately aims to discuss the human condition through textiles. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the moving passage, “Giving a voice to the silenced,” in the chapter “Cloth as Communication.” Gordon lists examples of women around the world and throughout history who illustrated through textiles the wrongs done to them or their communities. The connections drawn between myth and fact, between ancient history and current events, around the world and through time, demonstrate the enduring power of cloth as a universal language and effective tool for protest. The implications of the dynamics described in the passage, however, struck me as more complex than just situating textiles as tools for rebellion.. In many cases, whether it was Indian woman stitching images of gender-based violence into their saris in the 1990s, or Chilean women creating arpilleras during the Pinochet regime in the 1970s, Gordon cites many examples of women being tasked with creating evidence of their suffering in order to notify the public. The product is an expression of their trauma, but it is also a commodity, as evidenced by the Hmong story cloths sold to outsiders in order to sustain Hmong communities in the wake of their displacement. The fact that a story cloth depicting genocidal violence could be seen as a decorative object due to its artist and medium is shocking, but it also speaks volumes about the diminishment of handicraft and the fetishization of trauma, particularly in the context of art from the Global South. When women stitch their traumas onto cloth, they are engaging in a cathartic, therapeutic process, but they are also shouldering an emotional burden when they funnel the sufferings of their people into their work. This dynamic, replicated time and time again by women across the world, speaks to the power of women as ‘silent voices’ that capture and amplify history in the making, but also the emotional, unpaid labor women are expected to fulfill to prop up their societies. There is no doubt that works like arpilleras are prime examples of the radical history of craft, where women have played a central role, but it is once again necessary to invoke the multiplicity of the phrase ‘women’s work,’ and expand the definition to encompass the labor women must endure when they bear the burdens of society through their bodies, their psyches, and their art.