Women’s advocacy organizations often invoke moral arguments and frame issues in ways that make them legible within discourses on sexuality and race, with significance for struggles over decolonization, national representation, and schism within women’s movements. Postcolonial feminist theories help make sense of women’s activism that engages both racism and women’s rights. They provide a map of the symbolic terrain on which policy debates are fought, enabling us to identify the paths available (as well as closed) to women’s organizations as they negotiate a collective identity for their members, diagnose the problems they want to address, propose solutions, and select a strategy for persuading others to adopt their perspective. With a map like this, we can anticipate the ways in which different women’s organizations, differently positioned in terms of racial or national identity, may diverge, as well as routes to alliance. These are the tasks to which I turn when looking within the case of Trinidad and seeking to explain the different uses to which Afro-Christian, East Indian Hindu and Muslim women put race/nation in their activism. As a paired comparison of women’s activism in Trinidad and Guyana show, however, similar policy questions debated in comparable contexts (decolonizing states with histories of explicitly racial politics) can lead to strikingly different conversations, depending on whether ethno-nationalist frames occupy a central or peripheral position on the national stage. Theories of collective action framing, and the related concepts of state resonance and discursive opportunity structures, point to the role of institutionalized discourses and government priorities in shaping the choices activist women make about how to evaluate proposed problems and solutions to gender-based grievances. Process tracing reveals that values and beliefs institutionalized in state policies affect women’s strategic framing by creating discursive political opportunities. Broadly then, the contributions made further develop social movement theory by analyzing the causal mechanisms linking state-based discursive opportunities to the frames constructed by prominent women’s organizations. Because the Trinidadian case involves opportunities created by multicultural policy, the study also provides some insight into the effects of such policies on minority women’s activism in decolonizing, multiethnic societies.