Drawing on a feminist institutional perspective combined with nego-feminism, this article explores the ways in which women in a mining community in Zimbabwe experience and access power within a patriarchal social structure. Women vary in their ability to access power depending on their societal and personal characteristics, and in particular on their good behaviour, seen as a form of `doing gender¿. Some women are able to strike a patriarchal bargain, gaining episodic power over and power to (and power with) by adhering to societal expectations of good behaviour, although ultimately not challenging the existing male-dominated structures.