ABSTRACT
I am, or was until recently, a fairly typical product of the Bosnian Muslim middle class. Brought up in a small town in Bosnia, with both parents working, looked after by my grandmother, cocooned in the safety of a large extended family and a small-town, closely knit community, a European with the distinction of belonging (albeit in a secular way) to a unique religious minority, I was raised to enjoy all the privileges of financial affluence, good education, and the tolerant liberal environment of my social class. Three generations of working women in my family, my personal choices wide and all mine, with few pressures exerted by my social milieu, I was to be a woman of my own making, taught to influence rather than just obey the society around me. I was to move boundaries, my mother and my grandmother thought, further than they had managed (my grandmother had to do it with singlemindedness bordering on eccentricity, against the tide of her time, and at a price; my mother, at a lesser personal cost, still had to battle against male-dominated culture and frequently lost). The world that took from them was to be for taking by their granddaughter and daughter. Or was it?
