Once settling in the United States, refugees are entitled to many services, such as literacy programs, which are aimed at teaching them the English language and helping them develop the necessary skills to find employment and function in their everyday life. For a long time, schools and resettlement agencies designed ESL classes on the assumption that adult students had the basic education and literacy skills in their native language to learn another language. However, many refugees do not have the strong educational foundations upon which literacy is built; therefore, many struggle to learn English and become so frustrated that they ended up withdrawing. These programs are not necessarily designed with consideration to refugees’ prior literacy experiences or the cultural expectations and ideologies that refugees, especially women refugees, bring with them. For instance, due to cultural pressure, assumed gender roles (most women are stay-at-home mothers and housewives), and the need to work at an early age, especially in rural areas, literacy for many refugees, particularly women, in their native language is basic, so learning a second language can be challenging for them. In this presentation, I discuss the different struggles Syrian refugee women currently living in the United States, a country that has different cultural values, encounter. I explore the intersections of narrative, literacy, and refugee experience, more specifically gendered refugee experiences to examine the tension these women face between growing up in Syria and living in the United States. I unpack the kind of literacy work that is happening in these Syrian refugee women’s experiences and the ways the different kinds of literacy they practice affect their participation in public discourse. I show how the types of literacy these women engage with defy the Western definition of literacy and bring these women and their literacy practices to the forefront. I hope to challenge the dominant narrative, particularly Western cultures’ definition of refugee literacy and show refugee women’s experiences and voices that have been absent from the larger conversation in several fields. By creating spaces for refugee women’s narratives and stories to emerge and for their experiences and voices to be valued, resettlement agencies and literacy scholars can better serve the needs of these groups that were marginalized in their countries, through their journeys to asylum, and in the host countries where they resettle.