This case study, drawn from a rice‐growing region in Madagascar, demonstrates how gender and class differences shape individual access to and control of productive resources. Production strategies differ among the women and men who crop rice on shares and are primarily distinguished by class position and gender. Single women invariably share out the land they own to male croppers, whereas men of all classes may sharecrop land from or to other men. Only wealthy male farmers implement sharecropping as an accumulation strategy. Wealthy female farmers are concerned with mobilizing male labor power in their sharecropping strategies. Poor, landless, female heads of households are the only persons in this study who cannot and do not crop rice on shares and are the most disadvantaged and poorest.