My paper explores the legal-social experience of women facing domestic violence in the Jewish and Muslim communities during the French colonial period in Morocco (1912-1956). During this period, the French created an alleged separation between issues regarding personal status (mainly things that relate to marriage, divorce, inheritance) and all other matters. The former were left to the native communities to conduct, and the latter were handled by the colonial legal systems. Sensitive cases of domestic violence, that are located at the heart of personal status issues, highlight the places where inconsistencies, contradictions, and a lack of knowledge unsettled the formal colonial positions of separation between the different legal systems. This paper asks how domestic violence cases in the Muslim and Jewish colonized communities affected and were affected by social and legal trends. Within the changing colonial and communal legal structures, these case studies challenge the codified separation between the legal systems of personal status law and civil law during the colonial regime. Due to the scarcity of textual sources that refer to daily experiences of colonial subjects, especially those of women, my study synthesizes approaches in oral history, anthropology, and gender studies, a methodology that I call “Embroidering Histories.” Embroidery held an important place in the Moroccan domestic sphere and in particular in the marriage institution. Alongside analyzing textual archival research, I meet with Moroccan women who lived during the colonial period, learning from their traditional craft of embroidery and their life experiences. The knowledge from the craft itself, their oral testimonies and the material embroidered objects, create a new alternative archive. This archive contains diverse types of knowledge by itself and also helps guide and develop my textual archival search. In this way, “Embroidering Histories” uncovers knowledge that cannot be accessed through textual archives alone.