Composing a Life

overcome. Even before she became involved with the homeless, Ellen was involved in opening one of the first rape crisis centers located in the emergency ward of a general hospital. Rape too is a problem that could only be addressed when it became visible and when women began to realize that it was not a matter of individuals “asking for it” but of the way the society is organized—and to realize that the problem could be addressed systemically.
    In Iran, I did some research and writing about American women who had married Iranian men and come to live in Iran. Many were intolerant of Iranian culture, learning little and struggling to replicate their lives in America. Others tried to assimilate completely, as Americans tend to expect immigrants to this country to do, and they only developed a capacity for true selection when their total embrace of their husbands’ culture proved to be less than ideal. It is not sufficient to reject one tradition and embrace another—this is the convert’s danger, involving an oversimplification of both. It is also not sufficient to camp out in a new tradition without commitment, taking refuge in relativism to avoid responsibility and using distance to avoid the need to criticize the culture one comes from.
    Women have traditionally been regarded as conservative and inclined to stay at home. Going forth to seek adventure has been regarded as a male specialty—running away to sea, joining the circus, seeking new worlds to conquer. But conquest is not the best route to learning. An encounter with other cultures can lead to openness only if you can suspend the assumption of superiority, not seeing new worlds to conquer, but new worlds to respect. When young women arrived in Iran as the American wives of Iranian Muslims, they often came with assumptions of superiority, but their actual positions required sensitivity and adaptation, more like adopted children than like explorers arriving to claim new territory.
    Ironically, patriarchal society in its most traditional forms often assumes a greater degree of adaptability in women than in men, because of the set of conventions referred to as patrilocality: men inherit property and status. A man can stay at home to assume the position occupied by his father, bringing in a young bride who is expected to adapt to a new environment. Often, of course, the home the bride leaves is just down the road. In Iran and throughout the Middle East, the tradition that a woman leaves her family and becomes a part of her husband’s family is moderated by making the marriage as endogamous as possible. There is a strong preference for marriages between the children of brothers (“We wouldn’t give our daughter to strangers,” parents say). Still, it is the bride who is uprooted. “Whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God,” Ruth says in the Bible (Ruth 1:16). She says it, as a widow, to her mother-in-law, Naomi. It is an expression not of individual friendship between two women but of the fact that a woman becomes a member of her husband’s family, no longer of her own. Ruth’s alternative was to go back to her family of origin in the hope of remarrying and becoming a member of still another family. Naomi had proposed that alternative to both her widowed daughters-in-law: “The Lord grant that ye may find rest, each of you in the house of her husband” (Ruth 1:9).
    Of all the foreign brides I knew in Iran, my most vivid memories are of a woman named Julia Samii, who was killed in a light-plane crash before the revolution. When I met her, she had lived in Iran for many years and had achieved a unique combination of the two cultures. Her husband was from one of the largest and most influential families of the Caspian region, and she had learned to move effectively within the extended family—in fact, she was one of the few foreign wives I knew who had learned to feel enriched rather than burdened by a multitude of relatives. Her children were all genuinely bicultural. She was a devout Catholic, going several times a week to early mass at St. Abraham’s, a church run by Irish Dominicans that celebrated Abraham as the father of three often-conflicting faiths. The rest of the day, she worked for the Iranian Society for the Deaf, promoting the development of an Iranian sign language, work that brought her into contact with different levels of society and required a detailed