In January and November of 1857 two remarkably similar cases were recorded in the Sharia court registers in the Egyptian Delta town of al-Mansura. Each case was a suit brought by a soldier who served in the Egyptian contingent sent to the Crimean War, and who discovered, upon returning, that his wife had married another man. In each case the women testified that they became convinced that their husbands had perished, and so the believed that as widows they were free to re-marry. Neither woman was penalized since the judges found them to have acted sincerely on the basis of erroneous information. My paper discusses these cases in light of the evolving legal position of married women in nineteenth century Egypt. In initial stage of "modernizing" reform of the Ottoman Sharia court system, in the middle decades of the century, judges were restricted to applying Hanafi jurisprudence. This imposed disadvantages on married women that their mothers and grandmothers had not faced. Among other things, the Hanafi school presumed missing (mafqud) men to be alive into their nineties, and offered their wives no way out of their marriages even though they were deprived of all marital benefits including financial support. This problem was eventually addressed by Law No. 25 of 1920, which drew on non-Hanafi doctrine to enable the wives of missing men to petition the court to declare their husbands deceased. But between the middle of the nineteenth century and 1920 a widow was potentially better off than the wife of a missing man, including a soldier missing in action. Legal histories portray the legislation of the 1920s as improving the status of women by correcting problems supposedly caused by outmoded interpretation of the Sharia or the influence of "tradition." But as this paper demonstrates, some of the problems faced by women were the result recent "modernizing" reforms.