In the United States, beginning in the Colonial Era, women learned needlework skills as part of their education. They used these skills to decorate samplers, clothing, and other items. Society viewed needlework as a way to keep women within the domestic sphere, allowing them to fulfill what was seen as the proper role of their gender. However, the nineteenth century saw multiple instances of women using their homemade textile pieces as a way to participate in public events. In the North, abolitionist women created textile goods to be displayed and sold at antislavery, or sanitary fairs. In the South, women used their sewing and needlework skills to create local infantry flags during the Civil War for presentation at public ceremonies. Although many similarities can be seen in these items, these disparate women’s values, which were informed by cultural differences between the North and the South leading up to and during the Civil War, are illuminated within the individual textiles onto which women took care to emblazon words and symbols. A comparative look at the textile pieces of these women demonstrates the cultural differences which governed their lives, and subsequently their work, in the nineteenth century. Offering a close study of a particular abolitionist sampler and three southern Civil War flags, along with support from other examples, this project reveals that both groups of women, abolitionists in the North and the planter-elite of the South, were using domestic skills in order to enter public space. However, the abolitionist women used their textile pieces to quietly expand past the domestic boundaries placed on them by society, while the women making flags in the South applied their war-time work in attempt to bolster support for a war that would allow them to maintain their way of life within the domestic sphere.