Questions of class consciousness and of cultural belief and practice have dominated historiography on rural society’s responses to the socialist revolution in Mozambique, undertaken by the liberation front and governing party Frelimo shortly after independence in 1975. Frelimo uprooted rural people from dispersed, familial homesteads into new communal villages, with collective settlement and agriculture. Representations of villagers as ‘class’ or ‘cultural’ subjects have treated their social and political behaviour as undifferentiated within families, and de-emphasised strategies and choices amidst rapid political change. My interest is in the history and legacies of villagisation to consider the villages as spaces that were transformative of institutional and familial authority, and in which we can find how the state embroiled in struggles over land within the family. I draw on fieldwork in Gaza Province among women who were young at independence. Family elders and senior wives historically mediated land allocation in Gaza. Generational conflict between relatives influenced young women’s responses to reforms and harsh realities of villages in surprising ways. They created new relations of farming and exchanged land plots, as sanctioned by local party officials. Gendering our viewpoints reveals how villagisation constructed the Frelimo state as an instrument of social transformation, which allowed a generation of women, for the first time in their lineage, to access land, if precariously, independently of kin.