In this paper, I argue that one of the most critical ways of interpreting the changing meanings of “childhood” and “youth” in mid-nineteenth-century Cairo is through a close examination of the female domestic servants employed in the capital. With notions of mobility and urban space as my focus, I aim to broaden our understanding of the social categories from this period relating to spatial formation and the young girls who left their families to work in elite households. Broadly speaking, we need more research on the domestic servants laboring in the households of the Ottoman-Egyptian elite. While a number of archival sources document the experiences of female workers, I examine court records containing detailed accounts of the (mis)treatment of maidservants by their wealthy employers. Specifically, I look at an 1864 case from Majlis al-Ahkam (the Council of Judicial Ordinances), which deals with a servant who fled “out of fear” from an eminent Pasha’s household and the tragic outcome that ensued. Drawing from this one case, I seek to fill some of the research gaps regarding domestic servitude and the legal institutions that engaged with shifting conceptions of agency, movement, and coercion. I likewise address what court records can teach us about legal representations of servitude and the maintenance of local systems of inequality. In an attempt to make sense of the background of the young women and children toiling in elite households, I consider how the justice system depicted their lives and what effect these depictions had on official understandings of female labor. On the whole, young maidservants working in the domestic spaces of pashas and royal family members posed a significant challenge to the ability of the authorities to uphold the social boundaries governing daily life. Because legal institutions stood at the intersection of competing crosscurrents, the participants engaging with the justice system did so in conflicting ways. I therefore make use of court records that not only harbor contradictory views of youth and childhood, but also as a medium that can helps us reframe historical and historiographical questions concerned with the circulation of female bodies.