The outpouring of research on women and gender in China in recent years has changed the way scholars understand the relationship between women and their natal families. These scholarly endeavors have focused primarily, if not exclusively, on the upper classes, and have revealed that married women maintained close ties to their natal homes. Relying on the files of 124 legal cases from Nanbu County in Sichuan Province, this article investigates the role of the natal family in lower-class women's life strategies in Qing China. This article interrogates the relationships between lower-class women and their natal families. Is "spilt water" an appropriate metaphor to describe married women's lives? What factors affected the relationship? How did such relationships differ from those of the upper and middle classes? To answer these questions, this article examines several issues. First, women's daily contact with their natal families and the impact of those contacts on their marriages; second, the important role played by natal families in the crisis and collapse of a woman's marriage and third, the family bonds and benefits that marked the relationship between lower-class women and their natal families.