<p>Resilience is often imagined as something the individual carries within themselves—a capacity to endure, adapt, and recover. Drawing on interviews with 133 women across rural and urban Ernakulam district, we approached it instead as a higher psychological function assembled within socially and culturally organised worlds of support and constraint. Women often portrayed endurance as something negotiated through familial ties, community support networks, institutional systems, and cultural meanings that made adversity livable. The analysis points to the uneven ways in which access to support was distributed. Rural participants often described relying more heavily on collective networks amid financial and institutional insecurity, whereas Urban women, on the other hand, relied more on spiritual beliefs and gendered language to cope with isolation, discrimination, and the pressures of economic participation. Across locations, resilience was rarely narrated as an individual attribute, but rather as a relational process—sustained through relationships, improvised in moments of crisis, and authorised within moral expectations of care, duty, and sacrifice. By connecting intersectional perspectives with cultural psychology, we propose a shift in how resilience is understood, moving attention away from individual capacity toward the socially mediated conditions that make endurance possible. Instead of focusing only on how women cope, this perspective looks at how surrounding environments provide recognition, responsibility, and support, influencing whose strength can be sustained. In doing so, the article invites us to reconsider resilience as a collective and moral achievement embedded within everyday life.</p>