The post-Apartheid community history is a male-constructed space, narrated into present-day consciousness by male community leaders and history writers. The patriarchal worldview disparages women's contributions and activisms. This article reports on how Muslim women from a small fishing village in South Africa in the early 1900s strategized to cope with challenging socioeconomic circumstances. Based on the oral narratives of 10 women, aged between 80 and 100 years, a history emerges of community women as homemakers but not women of leisure. The class that they were born into required that they were active participants in the economy. Their narratives describe a community in which Muslim women had access to basic education and succeeded in becoming financially empowered, despite socioeconomic constraints. These findings challenge the global frameworks that depict Muslim women as submissive figures whose participation in the public sphere is marginal. (Contains 1 table, 1 figure and 6 footnotes.)