From Mashhad to New York: Family and Gender Roles in the Mashhadi Immigrant Community

Past Patterns of Partnership and Patriarchy The influence of past power structures and cultural values on the formation of gender roles after immigration is not clear-cut.5 Rebuilding one's life necessitates overcoming economic hardship, cultural challenges, difficulties with a new language, and, not least, ethnic and racial discrimination. Other differences were rooted in social characteristics, like the greater availability of education for non-Muslim girls.8 Nevertheless, household composition, gendered work roles, and power relations within Jewish and other minority families bore a remarkable resemblance to those of the majority society.9 In the case of the Mashhadis these similarities were even more pronounced, since the conversion turned the Mashhadi women, at least outwardly, into Muslims.