My paper seeks to examine the survival strategies of Muslim Ottoman women, living without the financial support of “a male breadwinner” in their families, by analyzing their petitions sent to the state departments and to the Sultan to request financial aid. Petitions are significant sources to get out the voices of economically destitute women who used “discursive strategies” to exercise their agency while bargaining with the state by carefully choosing their words in their petitions to manipulate the system for their own sakes. For example, these women represented themselves in their petitions as being moral mothers, wives or daughters of their sons, husbands and fathers in order to be legible “subjects” to the patriarchal state that reinforced “traditional gender roles” for women in family and society. The case of Mustafa Edib Pa?a’s family is a unique example in this sense to trace how the Pasa’s wife and two daughters used certain strategies to get privileges from the state through petitioning between the years of 1888 and 1907, a time period which mainly covers the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II. Mustafa Edib Pasa was a ferik (major general) in the Ottoman army who got retired and died in 1872 after serving almost forty-five years for the Ottoman state. After his death, his family was granted a very small amount of salary, which led them to economic destitution and trauma. In order to alleviate their economic distress, his wife and daughters petitioned to various state departments and directly to the Sultan to request a salary raise by emphasizing their state of poverty and Mustafa Edib Pasa’s “self-sacrificing” services for the state and the Sultan. By strategically claiming in their petitions that “a just and merciful” Sultan could not let such a Pasa’s family live in poverty and destitution, not only they aimed to manipulate the system for their own sakes but also they became a source of legitimacy of a just Sultan and its regime. Thus, while this paper aims to show these women’s endeavors and strategies to voice their requests, it also mirrors the socio-economic and political transformations of the Ottoman state in the late nineteenth century Hamidian period and how these transformations affected the everyday lives of Ottoman subjects, particularly women, on the ground. Finally, this paper seeks to reveal the agency of destitute Ottoman women in the Hamidian era and to bring new insights to Ottoman gender historiography.