During the post-socialist transition the state socialist welfare institutions (Asztalos Morell, 1999) came under serious challenges. These were related to monetary pressures from international banking institutions (World Bank) and led to serious cutbacks in 1995 affecting even such key social citizenship rights as the three year paid childcare allowance introduced in 1967. The allowance was rooted in the Hungarian welfare regime system, which built on a compromise between state policies for women’s emancipation assuming an excessive state responsibility for reproduction (economic and institutional) and patriarchy, i.e. men’s freedom from performing key reproductive duties. This compromise led, beside others, to women’s increased economic role in the families and the stabilisation of the dual earner family model. Capitalist transition transformed not only the production base of the country but even the conditions for state policies. While both traditionalist, Christian as well as liberal political ideologies gained foothold in post-socialist Hungary, neither of these proved to be strong enough to deconstruct the key elements of the above compromise. Meanwhile, the fundamental transitions in the economy destabilised established patterns of wage earning. This however contributed to a continued importance of women’s income earner capacity and so the maintenance of the dual earner model. The paper is to investigate in the case of rural Hungarian entrepreneur families, which reproductive strategies evolved in the process of launching family enterprises. These families, typically in their reproductive life cycle (raising small and school children), face the demands for extensive capital accumulation, which is the precondition for the survival of the enterprise under the pressures from a globalised economic market. This demand strengthens the necessity for economic collaboration between family members and puts demands on women’s economic contribution. The paper analyses, on the basis of 30 interviews, the reproductive strategies of three types of family farms: farms with only self employed members who have only agricultural activities, those who have also none-agricultural activities and farm families with one wage earner. The paper analyses the way families combine the institutions of prevailing redistributive (state welfare) frameworks, family, reciprocal and market alternatives in their daily reproductive strategies and the ways these strategies follow a gendered pattern.