We explore cases of women landholders who are also farm managers in Egypt’s New Lands (areas cultivated after the building of the high Aswan Dam) who, in order to gain power and control over resource use and access, behave as men by looking and talking in less feminine ways, acting serious and confident, and carrying out what is perceived locally as ‘dangerous’ muscular and technological activities. By such performance of masculinity, these women are accepted into male roles and subsequently effectively and assertively participate in public life, as well as access adequate irrigation water, additional property, and financial credit. We take a relational approach to understand these women’s success in adopting these tasks. We argue that these women adopt these masculine tasks successfully by also behaving as women, particularly by accentuating their propriety and submissiveness to male authority (by calling strange men brothers and sons, dressing modestly, refraining from joking, and describing themselves as ‘chicken’ in front of their husbands). They do so to gain acceptance, permission, and validation for adopting these roles by managing their husbands’ pride, maintaining male authority more broadly in the community and meeting the social expectation of propriety, which is threatened when performing these masculine tasks (irrigating at night, increased mobility, and interacting with non-related men). Men, depending on their relationships with these women, respond in different ways to these women’s infringement on domains of power and control by acknowledging their involvement as men colleagues or by undermining this involvement as being linked to the New Lands context, for example, claiming that there are less weeds and light soils in the New Lands or that there are certain new technologies which make muscular and dangerous tasks women-friendly. These findings emphasize women's agency (through strategic performance of femininity and masculinity) and confirm that gender roles change and thus not natural or fixed. It is important that women are acknowledged in performing masculine roles as these roles tend to be more valued (in terms of remuneration for example). One, however, should not lose sight of also revalorizing tasks which are labeled as ‘feminine tasks’.