This dissertation reclaims violence as an instrument of women’s power. From chaste maidens to elite writers, discussions of women’s agency in late imperial China have long centered on virtuous women. Looking toward the extraordinary to unlock a new realm of possibilities for our understanding of the everyday, I explore the lives of women on the opposite end of this spectrum whose choices resulted in run-ins with the law that bestowed punishments rather than honors. I draw upon hundreds of homicide reports (xingke tiben 刑科题本) preserved at the First Historical Archives of China in Beijing about wives sentenced to death for killing their husbands in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The impressions that these “female criminals (fanfu 犯婦)” left on the archive move us beyond an image of women as collaborators in the reproduction of patriarchy, making it possible to see the ways women not only worked within, but also pushed against and broke through, this gender system. I argue that historians have underestimated the role of ordinary, non-elite women’s emotional lives in shaping early modern Chinese society. Whether it be a young girl’s refusal to abandon hope of creating a life with the boy she loved since youth, a mother working to safeguard herself and her children from an uncaring husband, or an aged wife acting upon her sexual desire for a man half her age, these women’s stories compel a re-envisioning of traditional Chinese womanhood centered on resistance to and manipulation of what I call “weak patriarchy,” a new model for understanding gender relations in the Qing dynasty that challenges our assumptions about the supposed male dominance of the household.