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THE most striking Oscars outfit was surely Natalie Portman’s Dior cloak, embroidered with the names of female film directors not nominated for an award. An elegant protest.

We rarely think of needlework as making that kind of point, but we should. It was the sewing machinists at Ford Dagenham plant who led Britain’s female workers towards an Equal Pay Act. The People’s History Museum in Manchester holds an eye-catching collection of Suffragette and Trade Union protest banners — proof a subversive thread weaves through our national story.

In literature, sewing is often oppressive: confining upper-class women to the drawing-room, and their poorer sisters to workbenches. Margaret Atwood alludes to this in The Testaments, her follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale. In religiously orthodox Gilead, the girls destined to marry ‘Sons of Jacob’ are taught petit-point embroidery and crochet, whereas ‘Ordinary girls from Econofamilies’, get ‘plain sewing’.

Traditionally, sewing was one of the few jobs open to women; it is what the loveable Little Dorrit does to keep her family semi-afloat, while her father is interned in the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison. But it’s an intriguing piece — three beadwork letters, D.N.F, for Do Not Forget, sewn on the lining of a pocket-watch — that bring the mysterious strands of Dickens’s novel together.

Spinster originally meant ‘she who spins’, but came to denote an unmarried woman. Violet Speedwell, the heroine of Tracy Chevalier’s new novel, A Single Thread, chafes at the term. Her lover, Laurence, died in World War I, leaving her ‘a surplus woman’. But after moving to Winchester she becomes involved with its broderers, a sewing-circle community of women embroidering beautiful kneelers for its cathedral.

I’m a terrible seamstress. Just threading a needle for my son’s Cubs’ badges left me seething, my fingers punctured. Perhaps I should take inspiration and join a new feminist sewing group. Sewing, it seems, will always unite women.