My paper analyzes entries that appear in the sijills of the shari’ah court in Beirut between 1875 and 1914 in which wives, while still married to their husbands, appeared in court to demand at least one of the following: maintenance, a legal residence (maskan shar’i), and/or the rest of their prompt dower. In addition, some women also claimed that their husbands were refusing to relinquish their private belongings. In all cases, husbands and wives, while still married, were in fact separated. The analysis of the entries is grounded in the overall context of economic and legal change, and focuses on the strategies women used, and the extent to which they were successful in their demands. I argue, based on the evidence I gather from the entries that I discuss at length in my paper, that women in late-Ottoman Beirut, like their counterparts in other parts of the late Ottoman Empire, were knowledgeable of their rights under shari’ah, and of the ways in which they could use the law to their advantage.