Microfinance appears more and more as a tool for women's empowerment. This chapter offers an assessment of the links between the promotion of women's economic capability though the use of microfinance and their social and political capabilities. It shows that empirical studies, in particular fieldwork by the authors in West Africa, Bangladesh and West India, call for circumspection: microfinance can help to free women from certain links of dependence, but can also forge new kinds of subordination. A closer look at informal institutions may help to understand better women's old and new capability constraints.