This paper is part of a larger project whose overall aim is to investigate the representation of women's issues in Makueni District, a rural district in Kenya, using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The study explores the mismatches between the way politicians select and represent these issues and the way women construct these issues in women's groups. This paper focuses on representations of women's agency. How women construct their agency is contrasted with that of politicians and community leaders. This social science research is multidisciplinary and crosses the fields of language, gender studies and politics. Data was collected by use of focus group discussions, political speeches and interviews. The data for the entire study consisted of eleven focus group discussions with women's groups, four political speeches and ten interviews with politicians and other community leaders. This article is based on four focus group discussions, and four interviews. The analysis focuses on the use of pronouns and modality. Each of these linguistic features provides a different lens on the data which enables us to understand the construction of agency. While women, politicians and other community leaders construct women's agency within deficit discourses, these discourses do not match women's enacted practices or what political and community leaders say they expect of women. The contradiction inherent in the study is that everyone constructs women as lacking in agency, yet these women act as agentive subjects.