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Feminist political ecologies of land have long traced how land dispossession impacts women and exacerbates gender inequalities. However, there remains limited work on land compensation in extractive economies. In this article, we take this up via a focus on oil development in Uganda. We examine how compensation is bound up with, and reinforces, power inequalities of gender, marital status, ethnicity, and class. In particular, we focus on women positioned as non-favored or ‘secondary’ wives, highlighting their particular vulnerabilities to dispossession during compensation and resettlement. Our research is based on interviews, participant observation, and focus groups with secondary wives conducted in 2015, 2018 and 2024 in Kabaale Parish in the Albertine Graben region of Western Uganda. We trace the legal and socio-cultural norms that enable women’s dispossession, as well as their resilience following land loss. We trace the ways that intimacies of family, marriage, and interpersonal relationships are tightly interwoven with state policy, land wealth, access to compensation, and control of resources. We show that the land dispossession of secondary wives is not only a fall-out of oil extraction, but also facilitates it, making the process more lucrative for companies, the Ugandan state and, to a lesser extent, for resettled husbands. Our work makes important contributions to feminist political ecologies of land, marriage, and oil and gas industrial development in Global South settings. Given the centrality of patriarchy to extractive theft, we assert that analyses of this industry must consider the intimate and intersectional politics of compensation.