Recently, agency has become a key concept in social history and dependency studies, with historians of slavery taking on this subject with special gusto. We still know very little about eighteenth-century slavery in the Crimean Khanate, and almost nothing about the agency of female slaves. At least in part, the present study fills this gap, dealing with non-elite female household slaves in the Crimean Khanate, with qadi court registers dating to 1701-1710 the principal source. To what extent did female slaves resist asymmetrical dependency in the Khanate? Was this resistance organized or did it take place on an individual level? What forms of agency undertaken by female slaves can we trace in the qadi court registers? The aim is to understand how female slaves perceived their condition and how they responded to or resisted the decisions of their masters or mistresses. How did these women react to social and economic bondage? This study attempts to reveal not only female slaves’ physical actions but in addition, discusses their intellectual and cognitive actions such as planning (to run away or stay), deciding (to commit suicide or not), converting, adapting, and learning as different forms of female slave agency. By taking this approach, the present study further suggests that various physical and cognitive forms of agency on the part of female slaves made them co-agents when it came to determining their fates, despite the social and structural constraints imposed by the Crimean Tatars. This study also challenges our understanding of ‘social death’ among slaves. That is to say, non-elite household female slaves made decisions, planned their actions in detail, mobilized witnesses, sued their masters, and went to court. With good fortune, they might even win their cases and obtain their freedom. If so, they might chose to stay in the Khanate or else leave, in the latter instance waiting for the right time to do so. While the options of female slaves were severely limited because of their gender and slave status, the most resistant among them found ways of exercising a degree of self-determination. Keywords: female slaves, eighteenth-century Crimean Khanate, asymmetrical dependency, agency, non-elite slavery