Emecheta employs irony to great effect in the novel. The title of the novel is itself ironical. In fact, the novel could have been appropriately titled The Sorrows of Motherhood. Indeed, Emecheta demonstrates that motherhood in the traditional African society which she presents can have no joy. The mothers presented in the novel have no joy. Agunwa, Agbadi's senior wife, dies in despair and shame after her husband has made love noisily to his mistress in their compound with everyone fully awake.
Nnu Ego, the novel's protagonist, demonstrates more than any other character the reward which mothers get in society. Here Emecheta's irony is at its most pungent, her sarcasm most virulent. Nnu Ego suffers pain and distress in her first marriage when she fails to bear children. Amatokwu, her husband unsympathetically packs her off to her father's house. Her problems result from her inability to be a mother. When Nnu Ego moves to Lagos and marries Nnaife, she does bear children - very many of them. Presumably she should be happy and contented now and enjoy a blissful life. But ironically this does not happen. When she bears two male children, Nnaife begins to pay more attention to them than to her. She has borne him male children, and that is her only importance.
The boys belong to their father. This does not stop him from inheriting his brother's young widow Adaku and, running off to Ibuza to impregnate another of his brother's widows, Adankwo, a middle aged woman. Emecheta's use of irony is also seen in her presentation of Nnu Ego s children's attitude towards her. She toils to raise them and pays for the education of Oshia with great strain. Eventually, he goes off to America and abandons her.
He does not write to her, not to talk of sending any money to help her educate the other children. Adim is more sympathetic to his mother's plight, but, he also cares more about his future than about the suffering of the mother who has sacrificed everything for him and his brother. The greatest irony in the novel is that even though Nnu Ego has many children, some of them the prized male" breed, she dies a lonely death in Ibuza. Her only reward is.that "she had the noisiest and most costly second burial Ibuza had ever seen". Finally, there is the irony of a society in transition, yet unwilling to get rid of the old structures within the condition that limit the freedom of women.