Women's access to political power should be analysed, independently of other contraints, in its relation to the social model sustained and reproduced through and under androcracy. Pervading social relations between men and women, androcracy constitutes the foundation of gender inequality.

This chapter analyzes women's access to power in Mozambique by taking into account, first, the world context in which women's access to the political field is conditioned by the degree of "flexibility" of the social model, and second, the framework of the peripheral movements which, in penetrating the political field, seek to subvert it through a new praxis for living and thinking power.

The chapter explains how the elements of conflict at the different levels of social and political reality influence the emergence of three distinct forms of occupying the political field. First, there is a group of women that adapt or try to adapt to the rules, the hierarchies, and the party structure, resigning themselves to male superiority and to subaltern positions. The adoption of the rules of the political game characterizes a second group of women leaders. For them, competency for the exercise of power is the guiding criterium; gender relations and women's discrimination are problems that they consider to be solved, since laws guarantee, or may come to guarantee, human rights. A third form of exercising power corresponds to a subversion from within power itself. Demanding the right to conciliate the public and the private, disrupting the rigidity and the classification of roles and structures, the women in this group make and remake the paths between family and party; assuming their difference, they transfer emotion and dialogue into the political field.

However, these different forms of thinking and living the political cannot be used to make a rigid compartmentalization of modes of occupying the political field. This categorization is the result of an attempt to find common tendencies, taking into account the model of political organization and the specificities of Mozambique. It is interesting to note, for example, that if the fragility and instability of democratic institutions condition the inclusion of diversity, the specific characteristics of the country are conducive to the opening up of new perspectives in what concerns the emergence of alternatives to democratic practice in which women have a leading role.