“I think I am a very strong woman”: Arabic-Origin Women Mobilizing Values and Claiming Worth in Denmark

Introduction

If anything has characterized European public and political debates about immigrant integration in the past decade, it is the focus on values and value conflict (Foner and Simon 2015; Mouritsen et al. 2019). Immigrant incorporation is no longer only or primarily a functional or an economic question; politicians scrutinize immigrants’ values and often consider them to be incompatible with the values of majority populations (Tonkens and Duyvendak 2016). In many cases, gender is central to these debates, which juxtapose European “progressiveness” and the allegedly “backward” culture of non-Western, especially Arabic/Muslim, immigrants (Brubaker 2017; Simonsen and Bonikowski 2020). As reflected in discussions over honor killings (Korteweg and Yurdakul 2009), headscarves (Korteweg and Yurdakul 2014), forced marriage, female circumcision, and homophobia (Yılmaz 2015), European politicians portray Arabic-origin women as passive victims of a culture in which aggressive and oppressive men dominate. Media and political representations of the European-born daughters of Arabic families are more complex, depicting them, on the one hand, as being hindered in their integration efforts by traditional family and sexuality norms (Røthing and Svendsen 2011) while, on the other hand, praising them for their educational success and social mobility, which are taken to signify their ability to break free from their parents’ patriarchal and backward culture (Nadim 2015; Winther 2018). This latter portrayal may appear more positive than that of their mothers, but it similarly depicts “[d]ifferent cultures … as essentially different and irreconcilable” (Slootman and Duyvendak 2015, 147), with European norms taking the moral high ground and Arabic culture being deficient, or, even, outright wrong.

This article focuses on the mothers and daughters implicated in these debates. Considering the stereotyped and often-devaluing depictions projected onto them by European majority societies, ¹ as well as the juxtaposition of “their” culture against that of members of the majority group, we examine how these women make sense of who they are in relation to the broader society and what role cultural values play in this meaning-making process. Beginning from minoritized individuals’ self-descriptions, this article contributes to research on immigrant integration by offering an alternative perspective on the role that values play in integration. A large body of empirical studies has examined values with the purpose of documenting or explaining differences (or similarities) between immigrant minorities and national majorities (e.g., Alexander and Welzel 2011; Breidahl and Larsen 2016; Breidahl et al. 2021; Diehl, Koenig and Ruckdeschel 2009; Kalmijn and Kraaykamp 2018; Kretschmer 2018; Maliepaard and Alba 2016; Midtbøen et al. 2020; Nannestad et al. 2014; Ng 2022; Soehl 2017; Röder 2015; Wang and Coulter 2019). Broadly speaking, this work sees values as relevant to understanding immigrant integration to the extent that they make immigrant minorities and national majorities look more alike (Gordon 1964). We do not dispute the potential relevance of analyzing value differences in this way, but, as our article shows, whether values are conflicting or compatible is a matter of interpretation, and immigrants and their children take an active part in such interpretive efforts. In other words, integration is not only about value adjustment (as can be measured through similar attitudinal responses in surveys) but also about being able to see oneself as a meaningful member of a community. In this respect, cultural values can be mobilized as tools by minoritized individuals to make sense of who they are and claim their place in society.

The research presented here draws on 12 interviews with pairs of mothers and daughters of Arabic origin living in Denmark. Because access to these women, especially the mothers, is notoriously difficult (Caswell, Lauritzen, and Jensen 2008, 27), here, we offer a unique, in-depth examination of the intergenerational mobilization of values among individuals often seen in public discourse to be most at odds or in potential conflict with “Danish values” (defined by politicians as gender equality, active support of the welfare state through paid employment, freedom of expression, and sexual freedom [Mouritsen et al. 2019; Simonsen 2020]). Existing studies of minoritized individuals suggest that Arabic-origin mothers, because of the devaluation they experience, struggle with establishing worthy self-images and, thus, are likely to pass negative judgments on Danish majority society in an effort to restore their own worth (Faber 2010; McGhee, Moreh, and Vlachantoni 2019; Moroşanu and Fox 2013; Skeggs 1997; Warikoo and Bloemraad 2018). Relatedly, research on intergenerational immigrant integration leads to the expectation that the Danish-born daughters experience conflict in trying to reconcile values from two different cultures (Alba 2005; Kalmijn 2019; Kretschmer 2018). The women we interviewed, however, portrayed themselves as meaningful and valuable members of Danish society, mobilizing cultural values to dissolve some of the sharp boundaries produced in public and political discourse between Arabic-origin immigrants and Danish majority society.

These findings underscore the potential of studying not only the “objective” distance or commonality between the values held by immigrant and majority groups but also how minoritized individuals use cultural values to create space for themselves in the broader society and to establish their worth. To develop this argument, the article critically examines the immigrant integration literature's approach to cultural values and proposes an alternative perspective that calls attention to immigrants’ active use of values as meaning-making tools. The subsequent section makes the case for the boundary-drawing framework which, we argue, can highlight social actors’ mobilization of norms and values in negotiations about who belongs and who is worthy in a given society. The third and fourth sections discuss the Danish case and our empirical design before presenting the analytical findings. We conclude by reflecting on our article's implications for immigrant integration research more generally.

Values in Immigrant Integration Research

Cultural values have, at least since Gordon (1964), been identified as a central dimension of immigrant integration (e.g., Modood 2004; Schneider and Lee 1990; Waters et al. 2010). Based on his review of the terms used in academic writing to describe “what happens ‘when peoples meet’,” Gordon defined acculturation as the situation in which a group of immigrants change “their cultural patterns (including religious belief and observance)” to those of the national “core group” or “core society” (1964, 70). ² According to Gordon, the experience of various ethnic minority groups in the United States demonstrated that acculturation in US society was likely to happen with “rapidity and success,” especially among the second generation (Gordon 1964, 78). Later US scholarship criticized this idea, most prominently through segmented assimilation theory, which argues that not all immigrant groups are exposed to and absorb US middle-class culture but, instead, risk assimilating into an inner-city underclass or choose to maintain the home-country culture (Portes and Zhou 1993). Recent European scholarship, too, has been framed around the public and political concern that immigrants may not adapt to the majority's norms over time and generations and, instead, preserve distinct values and stand on the “outside” of European societies (Alexander and Welzel 2011; Breidahl and Larsen 2016; Diehl, Koenig, and Ruckdeschel 2009; Ng 2022). Implicitly or explicitly, this European literature sees value concordance as necessary and important, taken to signify successful integration, with value maintenance evidencing “reactive ethnicity” or a “retreat from the mainstream” (Maliepaard and Alba 2016).

The empirical results of this overwhelmingly survey-based strand of research have been mixed. Some studies find that immigrants adapt rather quickly to European majority societies’ norms, with full concordance within the second generation with respect to work-family orientations (Breidahl and Larsen 2016), gender norms (Ng 2022), welfare-state attitudes (Breidahl et al. 2021), social trust (Nannestad et al. 2014), and citizenship requirements (Midtbøen et al. 2020). Based on such findings, these studies typically conclude that political concerns are overstated. However, other studies demonstrate that some immigrant groups “lag behind” in the acculturation process and, in particular, that there is a strong intergenerational transmission of gender roles such that second-generation immigrants who grow up in gender-conservative homes and neighborhoods, especially those characterized by high levels of religiosity and adherence to Islam, will not easily adapt to more liberal gender roles (Alexander and Welzel 2011; Diehl, Koenig, and Ruckdeschel 2009; Kalmijn and Kraaykamp 2018; Kretschmer 2018; Maliepaard and Alba 2016; Röder 2015; Soehl 2017; Wang and Coulter 2019). In addition, higher levels of conflict in migrant families appear to be the result of children holding more liberal values (Kalmijn 2019). These studies seem, at least partly, to confirm European public and political concerns about irreconcilable cultural differences between the “core society” and some immigrant groups, pointing, in turn, to challenges for immigrant integration.

Despite the divergent results and, thus, different conclusions as to whether culture is adaptive or resistant to change, these studies all begin from the premise that immigrants’ fit with majority society can be judged on the basis of their attitudes on various value questions and that greater attitudinal distance between majority and minority populations means less integration. In this article, we challenge this premise: Whether the cultural values of immigrants and majority societies are compatible or conflicting and whether potential differences are important and relevant to people are matters of individual interpretation. Immigrants, we argue, actively engage in cultural interpretation; therefore, to understand the role that values play in integration processes, we must pay attention to immigrant-origin individuals’ perspectives on cultural compatibility and conflict. ³

Here, we argue for a different approach to the study of culture and values than that adopted in existing studies. We consider culture as the symbols and signs that people use to give meaning to the social world and their own lives (Geertz 1973; Swidler 2001), implying that we should examine values, not as objective entities that can be measured through positions on attitude scales, but as meaning-making devices. For this reason, we analyze how women of Arabic origin in Denmark use cultural values in their self-descriptions, emphasizing the role that values play for people in their understanding of themselves and their place in society.

Following previous studies’ interest in intergenerational value transmission and value conflict (Kalmijn 2019; Kalmijn and Kraaykamp 2018; Kretschmer 2018), we investigate whether and how mothers and daughters use cultural values differently when they talk about who they are and position themselves in relation to the broader society and to each other. In contrast to the work reviewed above, however, we do not a priori define the values of interest but ask more generally how the women present themselves and, in doing so, engage particular values.

Boundary-Drawing and Culture as Repertoire

To analyze how women of Arabic origin in Denmark use values in their self-descriptions and positioning, we rely on the concept of symbolic boundaries, defined as “the conceptual distinctions that social actors make to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space” (Lamont and Molnár 2002, 168). Symbolic boundaries exist in our language and thoughts and help us make sense of the environment that surrounds us by dividing the world into discrete categories (i.e., “the poor” and “the rich,” “people like me” and “others”) (Lamont 1992, 10–12). While boundary drawing is, in its most basic sense, about the distinctions people use to make sense of themselves and their relationships to others, these distinctions also often involve passing judgment on others in assessments of who is a “subject-of-value” — a worthy person — and who is not (Skeggs and Loveday 2012).

Lamont (1992) suggests that the most significant types of boundaries — or bases for making distinctions — are socioeconomic, cultural, and moral. Socioeconomic boundaries highlight social, occupational, and economic position, indicated by the material resources one has, including power, prestige, and professional success. Cultural boundaries are drawn on the basis of education, intelligence, manners, “taste,” and cultural sophistication. Finally, moral boundaries underscore moral characters, such as people's honesty, work ethic, personal integrity, or consideration for others. Dividing boundaries into these somewhat-broad categories enables researchers to identify patterns in the mobilization of values while at the same time maintaining openness to the way that specific individuals talk about the norms relevant to them.

Which types of boundaries are drawn by different individuals depends on the cultural repertoire to which they have access, that is, the narratives, ideas, interpretations, and worldviews intersubjectively shared in a society or group (Lamont 1992; Swidler 1986, 2001). In other words, individuals have a stock of tools and ways of approaching the world that they can habitually use because the social context offers certain ways of understanding themselves and others. The importance of social context can give rise to differences in boundary-drawing across, for example, ethnic, class, or generational groups, but how potential differences play out depends on the concrete mobilization of the cultural repertoire in specific situations (Swidler 2001). We may, therefore, expect differences in the boundary-drawing of mothers and daughters but also that the women have a degree of agency in how they make use of and combine their specific cultural resources.

Of particular relevance to our work are analyses of the boundary-drawing of marginalized individuals in a given society; that is, those deemed less worthy (or even unworthy), according to dominant modes of boundary-drawing. In general, most of this work focuses on how these individuals relate or respond to the boundary-drawing of mainstream society. For instance, in their studies in Britain and Denmark, Skeggs (1997) and Faber (2010) found that white working-class women sought to overcome their sense of devaluation by challenging dominant ideas about worth. By underlining that they had time for their children, in contrast to “career women” who were only focused on themselves (Faber 2010), these women presented themselves as morally superior to middle-class women. However, the time and energy that working-class women invested to “pass” as middle class (certain ways of dressing and decorating their homes, adopting particular hobbies) suggest that they could not escape seeing themselves through middle-classed value notions, in turn negatively affecting the women's sense of worth.

Similar tensions have been documented in studies of Polish (McGhee, Moreh, and Vlachantoni 2019) and Romanian migrants (Moroşanu and Fox 2013) in the United Kingdom and of children of immigrants living in low-income households in the United States (Warikoo and Bloemraad 2018). This research shows that minoritized individuals often subscribe to ideas about who is valuable and who deserves to belong that underscore their own marginal or precarious position. Although these individuals seem to engage in alternative types of boundary-work, they often seek acknowledgment from the majority society of their efforts to earn worth (e.g., through hard work, individual skills, and educational accomplishments).

In sum, then, existing boundary-drawing studies suggest that the women of Arabic origin interviewed here, because of the devaluing political and mediatized discourse at work in Denmark, will struggle to see themselves as worthy and, as a result, will pass negative judgment on Danish majority society by mobilizing alternative values that appear to underline their own positive distinctiveness. In addition, because the daughters, in particular, are clearly embedded in the majority society's cultural repertoire — through their life-long exposure to and engagement in societal institutions such as Danish schooling — they may be especially vulnerable to letting their worth depend on the outside confirmation, meaning that they may struggle to find positive meaning in values from their upbringing. In turn, daughters may seek to cross the boundary with the Danish majority by leaving behind values seen as culturally distinct (Alba 2005). The boundary-drawing framework presented here is useful for analyzing these potential cross-generational differences and conflicts because it allows for a systematic comparison of how values are used by individuals who both share and differ in their access to resources for positioning themselves and making value judgments.

The Danish Case

We situate our analysis in Denmark, where immigration and immigrant integration have been salient, negatively framed topics in political discourse for the past 20 years (Simonsen 2020, 2021). In parallel to our characterization of the European debate in the Introduction, politicians and the media in Denmark present Arabic-Muslim women as victims of an oppressive culture, most clearly signified in debates about gender equality and sexual freedom, which are framed as core Danish values and contrasted to cultural dress and behavior of immigrant women who are deemed “un-Danish” (Lenneis and Agergaard 2018). The image of the un-agentic and unfree immigrant women is juxtaposed against the depiction of Arabic-origin men, who, in Danish political discourse, often occupy the role of oppressors and criminal trouble-makers and are presented as “underperforming” in educational and socioeconomic settings (Gilliam 2009, 2018).

In addition to portraying Arabic-origin women as unfree and lacking agency, Danish politicians and the media also often bring forth the lower employment levels of immigrant women compared to majority Danish women to substantiate the idea that immigrant women are a burden to the Danish welfare state (Integrationsministeriet 2018; Lenneis and Agergaard 2018; Regeringen 2018; Witcombe 2019). What is more, their lower level of employment is, in the words of Inger Støjberg, who was Minister of Integration at the time of our data collection, a signal of their “not knowing the values and norms of” and “choosing to isolate themselves from Danish society” (Regeringen 2018). For those reasons, the then Danish government considered the women to be poor role models for their children's integration (Integrationsministeriet 2018). A tangible illustration of this logic is reflected in the fact that children of so-called non-Western immigrants who live in socially disadvantaged housing areas (officially designated as “ghettos”) in Denmark are required by law to attend nursery for a 25-hour weekly course from the age of one to help promote their understanding of “Danish traditions, celebrations, standards, and values” (Witcombe 2019).

Paired Interviews with Mothers and Daughters

We use in-depth, qualitative interviews (12 in total: five mothers and seven daughters) to explore how the women interviewed defined who they are and created meaning in their own words (i.e., without a priori defining the values under study). While mothers and daughters likely share cultural repertoires tied to their family and ethno-religious group belonging, daughters’ greater exposure to majority-society institutions also provides them with a different set of tools for meaning-making. In addition, the differential portrayal of the women in public discourse — mothers as burdens to the welfare state and daughters as victims of a patriarchal culture from which they try to break — potentially offers daughters greater symbolic leverage for claiming their worth and positioning themselves as meaningful members of Danish society. However, as we highlighted in our discussion of existing research, daughters may also feel a stronger need to live up to dominant notions of worth in Danish society and experience conflict with values from their upbringing. By interviewing pairs of mothers and daughters, we can investigate whether these conditions shape how the women mobilized values in their self-presentations, including whether they experienced any intergenerational value conflicts.

Research access to these women, especially the mothers, is typically difficult (Caswell, Lauritzen, and Jensen 2008, 27), which means that we may not have reached individuals who are wary of talking to a stranger (let alone, an academic interviewer). As with any other type of research that relies on respondents’ active participation, self-selection to participate may shape the types of insights we can gain (see the next paragraph on the recruitment strategy we used to diversify the group of interviewees). Nonetheless, and despite the fact that the relatively small number of interviews limits us in terms of offering empirical generalizations to a broader population, we believe that our analysis offers a unique, in-depth examination of how women who are often problematized in European public discourse use values in their self-presentations. In addition, we wish to underline that we consider our contribution, first and foremost, to be theoretical: We use the analysis to discuss the implications of our findings for the study of values in immigrant integration research, not to document trends among all women of Arabic origin in Denmark or elsewhere.

Concretely, we recruited mother–daughter pairs via social media (Facebook) and face-to-face interactions in social-housing areas around Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark's two biggest cities. We adopted this two-pronged recruitment strategy to ensure access to a variety of women. Daughters that we recruited through a Facebook group for young women in Denmark secured participation mainly of mothers in paid employment, whereas mothers lower in the socioeconomic hierarchy were recruited face-to-face in social-housing areas. These mothers, then, subsequently ensured their daughters’ involvement in the study (further details can be found in the Supplemental Appendix).

Figure 1 presents an overview of interviewees, including background characteristics. All mothers had come to Denmark in the mid-1980s to early 1990s (i.e., as young women) as refugees, except one (Tahira), who came to Denmark through family reunification. Since the women's socioeconomic position can be relevant for their boundary-drawing, we note that interviewees included lower-middle-class (Eman), working-class (Tahira and Fatme), and lower-class/welfare recipients (Rana and Khadija). While all interviewed mothers were positioned at the lower end of the Danish social and symbolic hierarchy, the boundary-drawing literature suggests that those positioned relatively higher up in socioeconomic terms can use their position as a resource for claiming their worth (Lamont 1992), not least given the political emphasis on economic contribution to Denmark's social-democratic welfare state discussed previously. We return to this point in the analysis. Being Muslim was not an explicit recruitment criterion, but all mothers happened to be Muslim, which was revealed in remarks they made during interviews. In the political discourse referenced above, their religious affiliation is considered to set them apart from the Danish majority (Lenneis and Agergaard 2018).

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Figure 1.

Overview of Interviewees.

Interviews took place in Spring 2018 and were conducted in interviewees’ homes. Mothers and daughters were interviewed separately but in direct continuation of each other to prevent them from affecting each other between interviews. Lasting between 1.5 and 2 hour, the semi-structured interviews started with interviewee self-presentation, before moving on to discuss everyday life and social relationships and closing with participants’ thoughts on Danish society. The interview guide was similar for mothers and daughters, with only a few questions differing where relevant (e.g., daughters considered their upbringing and relationships to their parents; mothers talked about their relationships to and dreams for their children, see details in the Supplemental Appendix). The first author, Sandra Angelika Pudlowska Al-Jarrah, conducted all interviews in Arabic (for some mothers with limited Danish skills) or Danish (for all daughters and some mothers) or a mix of the two languages.

Al-Jarrah is a woman of Arabic heritage, which was signaled to interviewees through her name, Arabic language skills, and phenotypical traits, creating a basis for trust and rapport. The fact that Al-Jarrah also has European heritage seemed to attune interviewees to explaining and elaborating on their statements because they could not assume to share all their experiences with her. As such, her insider-outsider status provided ideal conditions for making interviewees both comfortable and reflective. Finally, Al-Jarrah's immigrant background likely made it easier for the women to pass negative judgment on majority society in the interview, compared to a situation where the interviewer was of majority Danish heritage. Whether and how they did so is a central topic of our analysis.

Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, and translated from Arabic/Danish to English by the first author, Al-Jarrah, and analyzed using the NVivo software. Given our interest in intergenerational patterns in the mobilization of values through self-descriptions, we developed a coding frame based on the first round of coding of interviews with mothers only. This coding frame, built around the three types of boundaries identified by Lamont (1992) and in-vivo coding, was then applied to transcripts of daughter interviews. The coding frame is divided into seven general categories: self-description, socioeconomic, cultural, and moral boundaries, descriptions of Denmark and Danish society, and mothers’ and daughters’ view of each other (for details, see Supplemental Appendix). The first section of our analysis considers mothers’ and daughters’ self-presentations and the values activated to describe who they are in relation to others. The second section discusses how mothers and daughters mobilized these values to reflect on majority Danish society and their own place in it.

Mothers’ Self-Descriptions: Activating Community-Oriented Moral Values

Being “honest,” “kind,” “strong,” “humble,” “helpful,” “hardworking,” and “hospitable” are moral traits that recurred in mothers’ self-descriptions. Soon after having described themselves through such values, they turned to their families, whom they similarly described through the emphasis on moral qualities. For instance, Eman said that her husband was “a very good man” who was “funny and very helpful with grocery shopping or if he notices that I am busy.” The fact that the women focused on their families, not only on themselves, in their self-presentations is telling of the significance they placed on their role in the home and in relation to their children:

Sandra: What does your daily life look like?

Eman could have mentioned the fact that she worked as a chef (and that her husband ran a shipping company), but her job appeared almost irrelevant. It was her role in the family that carried real value for her (as we return to below, we only learned about the mothers’ job descriptions through interviews with daughters). Thus, despite variation in their previous and current socioeconomic positions, none of the mothers emphasized their own or other people's economic status in interviews. For the mothers who worked paid jobs, like Eman, their job was mentioned only in passing, as a fact, with life in the home and with their families being much more significant.

As these examples make clear, moral values dominated the mothers’ boundary work, but socioeconomic and cultural boundaries were not entirely absent. Socioeconomic and cultural aspects of their own or other people's life were only valued, however, if the mothers could see them simultaneously as morally significant. For instance, when mothers talked about their children's educational and career achievements, they highlighted moral qualities such as work ethic, being able to take care of the family, and contributing to society:

Khadija: My girls, they have ambitions. I’m very proud of them, they have never done anything wrong, they are very hardworking, they do well in school, and they both have a part-time job and volunteer … They are so considerate of other people … I really hope they get a GOOD grade point average and that they get a GOOD education, so they can take care of themselves in life, contribute, being well functioning in society, and with their future families. I really hope for that, God willing.

In interpreting Khadija's quote, it is instructive to recall the idea prevalent among Danish politicians that second-generation immigrant women's “integration success” necessitates a break with values from their upbringing (see the Introduction and The Danish Case). However, Khadija did not experience her children's socioeconomic mobility as representing a turn away from her values. Quite on the contrary, she interpreted the hard work that her daughters put into their education as evidence of their commitment to values of care and communal contribution to Danish society.

From a boundary-drawing perspective, values have the most significant implications when people make judgments of other people, that is, when they draw boundaries toward people they see as superior or inferior to themselves (Lamont 1992; Lamont and Molnár 2002). The most central figure for mothers’ negative value judgments was young Arabic men in their environment whom they considered to be at odds with the family and community-oriented moral values they themselves held dear:

Rana: Why don't they [young Arabic men] go to school, why don't they work? Why are they out on the streets drinking, smoking, and selling marijuana? … What are they doing for Denmark? How are they helping Denmark? They don't help at all. Everyone looks at that kind and says they are bad. Go and WORK, DO something for your family, do something for DENMARK.

As discussed in the section on Denmark, Danish politicians often portray Arabic men as oppressors and criminals and as socioeconomically underperforming (Gilliam 2009, 2018). While Rana may appear to echo this portrayal, the negative judgments that she passed on young Arabic men concerned the fact that they did not live up to the moral duty of being something for their families and “helping Denmark”; that is, the mothers’ boundary-drawing was based on a community-oriented cultural repertoire, not on concerns about economic contribution per se or the securitization at the center of Danish politicians’ boundary-drawing. In contrast to findings from other boundary-drawing research among minoritized individuals (McGhee, Moreh, and Vlachantoni 2019; Moroşanu and Fox 2013; Warikoo and Bloemraad 2018), which suggests that mothers would implicitly subscribe to value judgments that underscore their own precarious symbolic position as imagined victims of a patriarchal and oppressive Arabic culture, the mothers interviewed here used the figure of the young Arabic man to underline their own (and their families’) moral superiority.

Daughters’ Self-Descriptions: Activating Multiple Cultural Repertoires

In their self-presentations, daughters highlighted some of the same moral values as their mothers, describing themselves as “honest,” “kind,” “caring,” and “hardworking.” In contrast to their mothers, however, daughters also emphasized socioeconomic and cultural criteria of valuation:

Mariam: I am 33, and I am an economist, studied at Copenhagen Business School, graduate diploma … I started in the banking sector 10 years ago … I am open, energetic, hardworking, caring, uhm, humble, and I am honest too. I have been married for three years …, and we got this one [points at her son], who is turning one soon.

The way Mariam described herself, first, by reference to her profession and educational achievements and, then, by moral values (being hardworking, caring, humble, and honest) reflects a common pattern across interviews with daughters. Their work and studies were not facts to be merely mentioned in passing but mobilized as significant aspects of who they are. Similarly, when talking about their mothers, daughters used descriptions that mirrored their mothers’ self-presentations — “caring more about others than she cares about herself,” “warm,” “considerate” — but daughters whose mothers were in paid employment also highlighted the mothers’ job titles. Thus, daughters understood their mothers as carriers of socioeconomic value too, as such adding an additional layer of boundary-drawing.

Daughters combined not only moral and socioeconomic boundary-drawing but also different notions of moral qualities, mixing community-oriented moral values from their mothers’ boundary work (taking care of the family, contributing to society, and orienting oneself toward the collective good) and individualistic moral traits such as being “independent” and “self-sufficient” and prioritizing personal goals. Daughters’ tendency to draw on both community-oriented and individualistic moral values was expressed most clearly in their dreams and aspirations for the future, which involved both seeing themselves as “career women” and wanting to offer their children “a childhood that may well look like mine.” In this connection, daughters talked about their mothers as role models whom they wanted to follow, by potentially being stay-at-home mothers for the first years of their children's life. Thus, while daughters emphasized communal and family oriented values, they also highlighted individual ambition and independence and experienced no contradiction in combining these values.

As was the case for their mothers, daughters passed negative judgment on young Arabic men, but in the daughters’ boundary-drawing, stereotypes dominant in Danish public discourse shone through: These men were presented as “gang members” who “do not have a grip on their lives” because they do not pursue an education or a career and, instead, remain “thugs” with no positive ambition or idea about their lives. Daughters considered these men a “disgrace” and blamed them for making it harder for other people with an immigrant background, including themselves, to be seen as part of Danish society. Finally, daughters presented themselves as superior to these men with reference to their own educational and career success. Unlike their mothers, then, who understood the problem of young Arabic men to be characterized by a lack of concern for the collective, daughters subscribed to socioeconomic and cultural boundary-drawing dominant in Danish political and mediatized discourse along with moral boundaries related to not being in control of oneself.

To sum up, then, as was the case for mothers, daughters described themselves and other people with reference to their moral qualities. In addition, they referred to more individualistic orientations and to economic and cultural boundaries (such as professional success or intelligence). More generally, and in contrast to their mothers, daughters activated boundaries that they drew from Danish public discourse, as illustrated in their negative judgments of young Arabic men.

Mothers’ Mobilization of Values: Expansive Moral Boundaries and Strong Sense of Worth

Based on previous boundary-drawing studies of marginalized and minoritized individuals (e.g., Faber 2010; McGhee, Moreh, and Vlachantoni 2019; Moroşanu and Fox 2013; Skeggs 1997; Warikoo and Bloemraad 2018), we discussed the possibility that mothers would pass negative judgment on Danish society in an effort to promote their own sense of worth. In general, however, mothers did not talk much about majority Danes in interviews, and when prompted to do so (in the last section of the interview when they were asked to share their thoughts about Danish society), they often expressed identification with the majority Danish women they knew. Mothers described these women as “compassionate,” “considerate,” “honest,” and “open,” mobilizing moral values similar to those that they used to describe themselves and their families. Mothers also considered motherhood itself to be a uniting experience, connecting women across ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic differences, because “we all go through the same things in life.” Interestingly, then, mothers did not use the moral qualities they saw themselves as possessing to position themselves above majority Danish women. Quite on the contrary, mothers mobilized their family-oriented moral values to offer an alternative conception of boundaries, dissolving the economic and cultural distinctions employed in Danish political debate that set majority Danish women and immigrant-origin women apart and establishing, instead, a moral community that included both groups.

On a societal level, all interviewed mothers emphasized their appreciation of the Danish welfare state, which they characterized as “reliable,” “trustworthy,” “stable,” and “helpful” and saw as a manifestation of their own moral values, especially those derived from Islam:

Rana: The system in Denmark … it is an Islamic system … No Arabic country has a true Islamic system, those countries are bad; they do not help the poor, as is the case here … in Islam, it [helping the poor] is a very good thing, it is the way of the Prophet … In Denmark, everyone gives every month through taxes.

As discussed in the Introduction and the section on Denmark, dominant political and mediatized portrayals of Arabic-origin mothers suggest that they do not understand or contribute to the Danish welfare state and that Islam is irreconcilable with Danish/Western values (Brubaker 2017; Lenneis and Agergaard 2018; Mouritsen et al. 2019; Simonsen 2020). However, mothers interviewed here saw their care for other people and their focus on contributing to the greater good as being in complete alignment with Danish welfare-state institutions, which ultimately, in their view, reflected core Islamic values. By reconceptualizing “contribution” such that there was no distinction between paid employment and work in the home, mothers fostered not only a strong feeling of obligation to contribute to Danish society but also a sense of belonging and meaning. As Fatme pointed out, “I contribute, everyone does, whether they work at home or outside [the home].” Where survey-based studies have interpreted immigrant minorities’ support of welfare state institutions and “welfare state behaviors” as an adaption to majority values (Breidahl 2017; Norris and Inglehart 2012), these mothers mobilized values that are otherwise seen by Danish politicians and the media as “un-Danish” to ascribe meaning to the Danish welfare state, including their own role in it.

The inclusiveness of mothers’ moral community, however, was not unrestricted, and they also drew moral boundaries against majority Danes. When mothers passed negative judgment on majority Danes, they did so in relation to experiences with discrimination in public space, such as being yelled at or talked negatively about on the street, which they took to signify a lack of moral character among some majority Danes. Importantly, this judgment applied to the specific situations in which they had been mistreated and did not appear to color mothers’ general impression of Danish society. In addition, none of the interviewed mothers seemed to take these experiences to heart; instead, all talked in an affirmative manner about themselves and signaled a high degree of self-confidence:

Eman: I think that I am a very strong woman, hardworking, I can think for myself … I am not scared of discussion or discussing anything, I just say my words right out.

The impression that mothers did not depend on other people's affirmation or define themselves by other people's opinions provides a radically different image than the stereotypical views of Arabic women as un-agentic and unfree that we presented in the case description. It was not that mothers were unaware of these stereotypes but that such devaluation did not seem salient to them and was not a theme they spontaneously brought up. When prompted by the interviewer to think about how majority Danish society saw them, they mobilized their sense of moral worth to rise above stigmatizing portrayals:

Khadija: They think that I am a suppressed Muslim woman and don't have that much to say and such [laughs] … That we are forced into marriage, that we are weak, but they are being DECEIVED actually [laughs], it is the WOMAN who runs EVERYTHING … We take care of the finances, family, we do it ALL.

The discrepancy between how Arabic-origin mothers are portrayed in political discourse and how they saw themselves appears to be enabled by their access to and mobilization of a cultural repertoire that highlighted other value criteria than those dominant among Danish politicians and the media, subscribing value to mothers’ central function in the family and, thus, by extension, in the broader Danish society.

Mixing Systems of Valuation: Daughters Making Space for Dual Bases of Worth

As documented above, daughters activated values central to their mothers (such as orientation toward the family and the community) alongside more individualistic moral orientations and socioeconomic and cultural boundary-drawing. Daughters’ ability to mobilize two different, but for them compatible, cultural vocabularies stands in contrast to expectations from the literature on intergenerational integration suggesting that daughters, given their greater embeddedness in the majority society, would experience value conflict or feel a need to choose between the values from their childhood homes and majority society (Alba 2005; Kalmijn 2019). Instead, by mixing different cultural repertoires, they created meaning for themselves and their place in society. In the following, we analyze daughters’ mixing of cultural repertoires in their talk about relationships to the majority Danish friends and to their mothers.

In conversations about their majority Danish friends, daughters noticed that their friends sometimes engaged in behavior (e.g., drinking alcohol and flirting) incompatible with values from their own upbringing, but in the same breath, they mentioned their friends’ intelligence (cultural boundary-drawing) or good moral character, such as consideration for others:

Jennah: My best friend is Danish, she drinks [alcohol] and eats pork, but we are very alike … When I am at their place, they NEVER make pork, they care, and I appreciate it, and she may as well order a non-alcoholic drink when we are at a café.

Despite the registered differences between themselves and their friends in some behaviors, daughters were able to see themselves as similar to majority Danish women. In contrast to their mothers who, because of their commitment to one (moral) mode of boundary-drawing, only underscored similarities with majority Danish women, daughters mentioned both differences and similarities, thus showing that they were able to hold space for different vocabularies of worth simultaneously. In turn, they acknowledged the lifestyles of their majority Danish friends without expressing a need to shed some of the values of their upbringing to see themselves as part of majority Danish communities. Specifically, rather than considering consuming alcohol to “fit in” the company of her friend, Jennah saw the fit between her and her friend as grounded in their similar consideration and care for others.

The mixing of cultural repertoires to make sense of their place in Danish society as children of Arabic immigrants was also clear in daughters’ reflections on their mothers, with whom they identified and from whom they often found inspiration:

Iman: She [my mother] doesn't let herself be affected by what other people think of her … That is something I look up to, and like, she has been there for me, supportive and understanding, just supported me in whatever I have taken part in … I want to be the person my mother is … It's how I’ve learned to care … me and my mother, we are quite similar in many ways, but my mother is a bit more … She thinks more about the family.

In parallel to conversations about their majority Danish friends, daughters acknowledged differences and similarities when they talked about their mothers: They admired and saw themselves in their mothers’ prioritization of community-oriented moral values but also saw their own worth as more autonomous from the family, as expressed in Iman's concluding reflection. Their sense of autonomous worth did not mean, however, that they distanced themselves from their mothers or their mothers’ values. Instead, they gave meaning to important life choices from both an individualistic and a collective perspective. For instance, they valued (higher) education and career ambition as signs of individual success and intelligence, and, following their mothers, as a form of collective contribution, too. An illustration of daughters’ recognition of these dual bases of worth comes from Zahra's reflection on her and her mother's reasons for wearing a headscarf:

Zahra: I chose to wear the scarf myself, my mother was not even wearing the scarf, she did it later because of us … She thought it was weird if she was not wearing it when we were wearing it. As a mother, you know, because she thinks it's a family thing, and that it looks bad for us all if she's the only one … I just think it is something that you do for yourself; it is between you and God.

While contrasting her and her mother's decisions, Zahra also recognized her mother's worth and how it was based on community-oriented moral values, providing meaning to similar actions in different vocabularies.

As our analysis of daughters’ reflections on their relationships to majority Danish friends and their mothers show, their access to different types of values enabled (rather than hindered) them in finding worth and meaning for themselves, as well as for their families and friends. Instead of experiencing conflict with their families or with the values that the family represents (cf., Alba 2005; Kalmijn 2019; Kretschmer 2018), it appears that daughters could use the inspiration they drew from their mothers’ insistence on their own values to make space for dual bases of worth.

Discussion and Conclusion

In light of the dominant political and media discourse that questions immigrants’ cultural fit in European societies, we asked how women of Arabic background, one of the groups considered by Danish politicians to be most at odds or in conflict with “Danish values,” make sense of who they are in relation to society. We argued that studying self-presentations can illuminate how minoritized individuals, such as the women examined here, establish ideas about belonging and worth through their activation and mobilization of values. Thus, as an alternative to the focus on “objective” attitudinal differences or similarities characterizing most existing research on values in immigrant integration (Alexander and Welzel 2011; Breidahl and Larsen 2016; Breidahl et al. 2021; Diehl, Koenig, and Ruckdeschel 2009; Gordon 1964; Kalmijn and Kraaykamp 2018; Kretschmer 2018; Maliepaard and Alba 2016; Midtbøen et al. 2020; Nannestad et al. 2014; Ng 2022; Röder 2015; Soehl 2017; Wang and Coulter 2019), this article is concerned with minoritized individuals’ active and potentially creative use of cultural values.

Our findings show that the women we interviewed employed values that are otherwise presented by Danish politicians and the media as “un-Danish” to create compatibility between themselves and majority society. A concrete example is how mothers presented the Danish welfare state as embodying Islamic moral teachings. Although these women are often portrayed by politicians and the media as a burden to the welfare state (Integrationsministeriet 2018; Lenneis and Agergaard 2018; Regeringen 2018; Witcombe 2019), they presented themselves as meaningful and valuable members of Danish society because they occupied an important role in the family and in the home and, thus, by extension, in the broader society. As such, they offered an alternative interpretation of “cultural fit” than dominant understandings of the incompatibility of Islam and European societies (Brubaker 2017). Specifically, seeing the welfare state through a community-oriented moral lens, the women dissolved the economic and cultural distinctions employed in Danish political debate and established a moral community that included everyone committed to contributing to society.

In addition to providing insight into expansive uses of cultural values, this article also suggests that having access to different cultural repertoires need not lead to a split or conflictual identity. In contrast to perspectives that underscore the difficultly of living “between cultures” (Alba 2005; Kalmijn 2019), daughters in our study mixed values from their childhood homes and majority society, enabling them to see many different categories of people as worthy and valuable (Lamont 2018). Mixing values are drawn from different cultural repertoires also enabled daughters to make sense of their own and other's life choices. For instance, they did not see their socioeconomic mobility as predicated on a break with the orientations dominating their upbringing; quite the contrary, they generated worth and meaning for themselves by simultaneously interpreting their educational and career success as signs of individual ability and communal contribution.

Based on these findings, we argue that the dominant approach to the study of values, where values are measured through attitudes to various survey questions, risks missing an important point illuminated here: Immigrant integration is not (only) about value adoption or similarity. Similar attitudinal responses may be based on differing value orientations, and dissimilar attitudinal responses may be over-interpreted as representing value conflict. In addition, intergenerational differences in specific attitudes may not necessarily signal that the second generation is distancing itself from the first generation. As we have demonstrated, it is possible for daughters to simultaneously subscribe to different cultural repertoires, mobilizing and mixing values from their upbringing and from majority society.

Beyond our theoretical contribution to the study of immigrant values, this article offers a new perspective on Arabic-Muslim immigrant women and on the boundary-drawing of minoritized individuals more generally. Its empirical contributions should be considered in light of the small number of interviews on which the analysis is based. To be clear, we do not suggest that all women of Arabic background in Denmark or other European societies use cultural values in similar ways, but we believe that our findings carry empirical significance, as they challenge popular (and to some degree, academic) understandings of these women, including topical questions about value conflict.

In particular, in contrast to findings from existing boundary-drawing studies of marginalized and minoritized individuals (Faber 2010; Guetzkow and Fast 2016; Moroşanu and Fox 2013; Newman 1999; Skeggs 1997), the women analyzed here did not establish worth based on value notions generated in opposition to or as a protective shield against majority society. Even women who occupy stigmatized positions in society (being unemployed, living in social housing, etc.) did not experience themselves as in conflict with or marginal to Danish community. That they saw themselves as valuable for Danish society and in alignment with its core values represents an important resource for the women and carries implications for broader debates about social cohesion. Specifically, communities depend on people feeling belonging and commitment toward one another and toward core institutions. The women in our study showed that they were able to feel belonging and commitment to Danish society but only so long as they could use their specific cultural repertoires.

Thus, while our findings suggest that concerns about incompatibility or conflict related to Arabic-origin women's values are overstated, we do wish to point out a potential risk in closing. As discussed above, the worth that women in this study displayed was based on their insistence on a distinct cultural repertoire (mothers) or the creative combination of this repertoire with boundary-drawing dominant in Danish majority society (daughters). We believe, therefore, that there is a risk of meaning-loss if such women were not allowed to use these distinct types of boundary-drawing. The Danish “ghetto” law's compulsory childcare requirement represents such a risk, as it could deprive mothers of an important source of worth (child-caring), while teaching their children that the values of their childhood home are wrong. Our findings illustrate that daughters found much inspiration and strength in their mothers’ insistence on their distinct values. We believe, thus, that the suspicion and devaluation characteristic of contemporary Danish politics could risk being counter-productive for future generations of Arabic-origin women trying to find space for themselves and their values in Danish society.

In closing, we encourage future research on how minoritized individuals of immigrant background actively mobilize values to interpret their own belonging in a given society. Attention to gender appears to be a central avenue for future studies within this agenda. Young Arabic-origin men recurred as negative stereotypes in interviews, which calls into question how fathers and sons mobilize values in self-descriptions. As we have argued, it is important that individuals with immigrant backgrounds see themselves as valuable and meaningful members of society. If these young men are met with devaluations from many sides, including from other ethnic minorities, the task of finding their place may be significantly more complicated than what we have documented for the women in our study.

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