aspasia Volume 9, 2015: 1–18 doi:10.3167/asp.2015.090102 p Daughters of Two Empires Muslim Women and Public Writing in Habsburg Bosnia and Herzegovina (1878–1918) Fabio Giomi ABSTRACT This article focuses on the public writings of Muslim women in Bosnia and Herze- govina in the Habsburg period. From the beginning of the twentieth century, several Muslim women, mainly schoolgirls and teachers at Sarajevo’s Muslim Female School, started for the first time to write for Bosnian literary journals, using the Serbo-Croatian language writen in Latin or Cyrillic scripts. Before the beginning of World War I, a dozen Muslim women explored different literary genres—the poem, novel, and social commentary essay. In the context of the expectations of a growing Muslim intelligen- tsia educated in Habsburg schools and of the anxieties of the vast majority of the Mus- lim population, Muslim women contested late Otoman gender norms and explored, albeit timidly, new forms of sisterhood, thus making an original contribution to the construction of a Bosnian, post-Otoman public sphere. KEYWORDS: Bosnia and Herzegovina, female education, female writing, Habsburg Empire, Muslim woman question, Muslims, Otoman Empire, segregation p Since at least the 1980s, historical research has increasingly explored the living condi- tions of Muslim women across the Otoman and post-Otoman space. 1 In particular, this historiography has focused on the position of women in the political, social, and cultural transition of the region in the final years of the empire and the first years of its successor states, as well as on their representations in Western discourses. 2 Muslim women living in the Yugoslav space, however, have not received the same atention as their homologues in Turkey, Egypt, the Maghreb, or the Mashriq, representing an excellent case of female invisibility in history. 3 Yugoslav Muslim women have somehow remained in the shadow of two different historiographies. Women’s history in Yugoslavia, which developed mainly in the main academic centers of the country—such as Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana—shed light theme section Rethinking Empire from Eastern Europe