ABSTRACT
As we have seen, in the Habsburg period Muslim women did not directly participate in the nebula of associations that were blossoming in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Great War abruptly changed this state of affairs. In a context in which society was coming to terms with the devastating consequences of war, and the region was torn in the process of the establishment the first Yugoslav state, Muslim women began to engage directly in volunteering. The following pages thus focus on the social circumstances that made this new form of engagement possible, and on the strategies Muslim women elaborated in order to participate in different kinds of voluntary associations, namely philanthropic, cultural and feminist. Special attention will be dedicated to the specific ways in which Muslim women appropriated volunteering, a practice that openly challenged the rules of sexual and confessional segregation still being enforced in Bosnian urban centers.
