One of the most serious dilemmas of Ottoman social and cultural historians is the impossibility of reaching primary sources about those traditionally "humiliated and insulted" groups. In records kept for the state, in different forms of official documentation, subaltern groups such as women, children, slaves, immigrants, criminals become only partially visible. On the other hand, sources through which we can hear the voices of these individuals in their own words are extremely rare. Her social status makes it impossible to call her 'an ordinary woman'. Yet, Saibe Örs' memoir covering Abdulhamid II's reign, the Young Turk regime and the First World War is an extremely valuable historical source giving voice to a woman, who is neither an intellectual nor a public figure. Saibe Örs was born in 1885 as the granddaughter of Hasan Hüsnü Pasha, famous Minister of Navy of Abdulhamid II. Her narrative offers an important testimony about the lives of women from the privileged classes. Though written with an overwhelming tone of a victim (of a patriarchal society, of Muslim bigotry, of unloving parents, of 'ugly' or old husbands, and so on), her account of the late Ottoman period is rich with women's autonomy over household affairs, with women's many strategies to take control of their lives, and thus with women empowering themselves in resistance to all forms of subordination. In this paper, focusing on many women characters that Saibe describes in a detailed manner, such as her mother, stepmother, paternal aunt, mother in law, I will delineate different forms of women's agency, resistance, and empowerment. In addition, by juxtaposing these obvious manifestations of power to Saibe's self-ascribed dependence, inability, and victimhood, I will reflect upon paradox of subjectivation. These essentially different portrayals of women provide flesh and bone to the theory that processes and conditions that secure a subject’s subordination are also the means by which she becomes an individual subject and active agent.