This study centers the voices, narratives and knowledge produced by Rwandan women. It draws
upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2014 with a rural women’s collective in the Southern
Province of Rwanda. The women’s collective comprises women survivors and wives of
perpetrators who came together to form an economic cooperative in the aftermath of the
genocide. The cooperative is now regarded as one of the first reconciliation initiatives in the
country. In this study, I argue that women in the collective draw upon an idealized idiom of
marriage in order to provide social continuity in the wake of extreme social upheaval. In doing
so, women fulfill their responsibilities as female-heads of households in the physical absence and
narrative presence of husbands.