The United Nations declared 2012 the “International Year of the Cooperative.” This level of international attention is largely rooted in the growing use of cooperatives as a development tool that targets both poverty reduction and empowerment, especially for women. Women’s cooperatives are increasingly popular in several countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), where they are seen as a one of the more culturally acceptable forms of women’s empowerment initiatives. At the core of their popularity is the belief that they can provide economic benefits to the family and community as a whole, and the fact that they do so using market structures, rather than the political sphere. The normative discourse around women’s cooperatives has largely discouraged a critical examination of their effects on women, especially in the MENA region. In this paper, I seek to address this void. To do so, I trace how cooperatives emerged alongside the growing empowerment discourse. Next, I take apart the meaning and different manifestations of women’s cooperatives to help problematize the discourse surrounding them and to facilitate a discussion on critiques of cooperatives. Finally, I illustrate problematic components of women’s cooperatives through the example of women’s Argan cooperatives in the Souss Massa Dra’a region of Morocco, where they have become a prominent development strategy. This example highlights the effects of the ritualization and normalization of women’s cooperatives and specific cooperative models; the limited ability of cooperatives to overcome structural constraints to gender equality (working within these structures instead); the tendency to limit assessment of cooperatives to economic effects alone, assuming that this will translate into general empowerment; and the way that cooperatives can be used to fulfill a variety of political and ideological interests in potentially problematic ways. In this paper, I rely on original field work with women’s cooperatives in Morocco, as well as previous literature on empowerment and women’s cooperatives, especially the works of Naila Kabeer, Srilatha Batliwala, and Linda Mayoux. Finally, I analyze the discourse on empowerment and cooperatives among major donors and international organizations like the World Bank and the United Nations.