The Joys of Motherhood

Teresa Derrickson (Essay Date 2002)

SOURCE: Derrickson, Teresa. "Class, Culture, and the Colonial Context: The Status of Women in Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood." International Fiction Review 29, nos.1&2 (2002): 40-51.

In the following essay, Derrickson explores the theory that the women in Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood suffer from a clash between the traditions and values of Ibo culture and the values of British colonizers, instead of being victims of an oppressive patriarchal culture.

Much of the written scholarship on Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood (1979) focuses on the novel's critique of traditional Ibo society.¹ Specifically, such articles read Emecheta's text as a denunciation of the reproductive practices of the Ibo people, practices that do harm to women by promoting (and indeed institutionalizing) the idea that a proper wife should seek only to beget and care for her offspring...