Women’s legal subjectivity was constructed more on the category of “wife” than that of “woman” in the early-modern Ottoman legal practice. Despite the fact that the Islamic jurisprudence gave in theory the adult “woman” full legal capacity in certain fields such as property and inheritance, “wife” had a more privileged position even in these fields. Legal subjectivity which women acquired through “wife” in the Ottoman context was also very effective in the field of woman-initiated divorce. Yet, more important than these, women often appeared as legal subjects through the status of “wife” in the early-modern Ottoman legal practice. In this paper, I propose to analyze another possibility of the legal subjectivity that marriage provided for the early-modern Ottoman muslim woman: the transitional moment in which the adult female was supposed to become her husband’s wife through the consummation of marriage. This instance in which the Ottoman muslim woman appeared in the court as a “virgin wife” was an instance in which she stood between the licit and illicit, and thus became a threat to the gender order in the society. Thus, in this paper I will argue that it was not a coincidence that the Ottoman woman acquired a prominent legal subject-position at this very moment in the early-modern legal practice. This paper will therefore explore the phenomenon of women refusing to “surrender themselves” to their husbands in the court records of mid-eighteenth-century Anatolia. It will discuss how the early-modern Ottoman-muslim woman acquired a legal subjectivity within “wife” through which she had a voice over her body and sexuality while being subjectified to a gendered matrimonial order. It will argue that the “virgin wife”’s body, which was positioned on the border between the licit and illicit, became a sign of her sexual and marital rights.