The study of women’s associations and their role in transforming gender roles and relationships has been a fertile ground for social sciences. However, in the case of the Spanish context, these have been particularly linked to the militant spaces of feminism, with limited investigations into the processes of these other non-feminist or actively defined spaces. An ethnographic case study carried out in Granada, Spain, presents in this article the development and outcome of the inquiry into the role of associative experience in older women. We also put the concept of empowerment at risk by including it as an analytical tool for our purposes.