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Based on a study of women’s groups, mostly gathering women farmers who work alongside their spouses and where a private experience both intimate and professional is expressed, this article shows how these spaces simultaneously produce a politicisation as well as a depoliticisation of conjugal inequalities. By encouraging the expression of subjectivity and by collectivising personal life stories, these groups promote the emergence of a “gender consciousness”, help to identify situations of male domination and stand as support for challenging these injustices. However, these symbolic encouragements for autonomy do not completely transgress the marital ideal that provides the economic base of family farms and, in doing so, constitutes an emotional, professional and identity basis. Therefore, women farmers’ claims for equality are based on a differentialism that maintains a conventional distribution of gender roles and endows women farmers with a tutelary mission of preserving “respectable” conjugality.