This paper considers the various laborings that Syriac Orthodox women performed to maintain social and religious community in the 19th century, specifically in the Ottoman East. Scholars of gender and sexuality have shown that women’s participation in patriarchal institutions is complex and not a simple binary of oppression versus agency. Thus, this paper seeks to critically examine how women and their work was represented by (often) male writers, who had certain stakes in presenting their community as virtuous (for the clergymen and monks) or backwards (for the American and English missionaries), during this time period of great change and strife. My goal is to think together of the representations of women with their ritual and subjective experiences of spirituality to better understand their roles in their communities. Examining court records of inheritance cases, church registers of donations, oral histories of genealogies, and travelogues, I argue that women are present in the archive but are ignored for the sake of arguments that erase their presence (e.g. nascent nationalism, inter-ethnic conflicts, Ottoman state-building in the region). In fact, these communities could not have survived without the quotidian labor of maintaining households and holy spaces and the affective work of worship (e.g. preparing for the many fasts throughout the year, fertility pilgrimages, oral traditions of healing and medicine).