In my job market paper, my co-author (Sigrid Weber) and I pose the question: how do women assert power and negotiate space within the household? Existing literature suggests that factors outside the household shape women’s empowerment – such as employment opportunities, laws, and societal norms. We explore how women make use of resources within the household to assert power. We argue that in restrictive settings, household labour is not just a loss of time for women. Instead, women use the allocation of different types of household tasks to pursue their own goals and prefer household work that increases their decision-making capacity without having to overtly negotiate or challenge the status quo. We test this theory using original survey and qualitative data from Zambia. We find that women in Zambia follow traditional social norms and complete the vast majority of household work with adverse effects on their economic and political participation. However, where possible, their choice of tasks can bring them closer to community with others, offer them decision-making power and provide them with access to resources. Women that take over more cognitive household work show more confidence in their political knowledge; and those that take over more `empowering' tasks in a vignette experiment are perceived as more empowered and skilled. In putting forward these empirical findings, we attempt to provide a nuanced argument of the relationship between housework, time allocation and women's empowerment, and to highlight household work as a "weapon of the weak" (Scott, 1985) that women can employ in highly constraining spaces to assert agency.