Women Between Cultures

What role can immigrant, asylum-seeking, and refugee women play in local communities? Are they able to shape their lives on their own terms and contribute with their knowledge and experiences? And how do they navigate questions of gender, ethnicity, social roles, and future opportunities?

These questions have become increasingly relevant in Norway over the past decades. Since the 1990s, the number of immigrant women in transnational marriages—marriages between women from abroad and ethnic Norwegian men—has grown steadily. According to figures from Norwegian women’s shelters in the mid-2000s, more women obtained residence permits in Norway through marriage than through refugee status.

Despite these numbers, the situation of immigrant women in such marriages has received relatively little attention in political debate and public discourse.

For many women, moving to a Nordic country through marriage means entering a society that is unfamiliar in language, culture, and social structures. The transition can be particularly challenging in the early stages. Limited language skills and the absence of a personal support network often leave newly arrived women dependent on their spouse and the spouse’s family for social contact and everyday navigation.

Within this complex landscape, questions of agency, belonging, and participation become central. How immigrant women experience and negotiate these challenges—while building new lives and identities—remains an important, yet often underexplored, dimension of contemporary Norwegian society.