“A well-framed, systematic investigation into what the archives tell us about Muslim women’s lives in Bosnia-Herzegovina between the end of Ottoman rule and the onset of World War II. Without romanticizing or downplaying the extent of control exerted on women by the prevailing gender regime of the time, Giomi's study shows in vivid, contextualized detail how Muslim women also did not conform to orientalist and Balkanist stereotypes of silenced, oppressed, and invisible figures. By highlighting these community and individual efforts at improving Muslim women's lives and educational access well before the establishment of socialist Yugoslavia, this book further breaks down the myth that the legal reforms and banning of the face veil by the Yugoslav state unilaterally ‘liberated’ Muslim women and the Bosnian Muslims as a whole."
Reviewed book:
