This article examines the specific circumstances of late-colonial politics in the Dutch Caribbean (historically known as the Dutch West Indies), as well as the level of women’s education and their integration into civil society, with particular reference to the emergent women’s movements in Curaçao and Aruba. Examples of these movements (from the 1940s to the early 1990s) are analysed in order to understand what underlay the strategies that rendered women’s activism effective. This article proposes the hypothesis that successful strategies depended on many forms of adjustment to women’s particular environment. Although the success of such movements can certainly be attributed to active intellectual intervention and a shrewd understanding of shifts in the political context, in the end what counted most was not so much ideology, knowledge or strategy, as the ability to find the right moment for action, to find ways of organizing and cooperating, in order to ride the tidal waves of progress.