This study investigates the role of culture in women’s empowerment in Kenya. Kenya serves as an ideal case study because it has strong ethnic and cultural diversity and a high proportion of men and women who justify the patriarchal practice of wife-beating. This investigation employs the women’s surveys from the 2014 round of the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) in Kenya to perform logistic regressions of factors shaping a woman’s justification of wife-beating across five hypothetical scenarios that can occur between a husband and wife. Results reveal that there are significant differences in women’s beliefs about wife-beating across ethnic groups, educational categories, and experience migrating. I draw on Swidler’s theory of culture to draw two conclusions from these findings. First, Kenyan ethnic groups are a source of culture that women draw on to form their repertoire of patterned action and belief during periods of settled life. Second, education and migration represent Kenyan women’s encounters with new gender ideology and experiences with resocialization during periods of unsettled life. These experiences offer opportunities for women to gain critical consciousness, or a reflexive vantage point from which they can assess whether their culture’s gender beliefs about wife-beating are, indeed, unjust.
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