wife. When Adah is recovering from giving birth to their third and fourth children, he has to work temporarily and berates her for being “lazy.” He wonders why he bothered marrying an educated woman with a high bride-price if she just wanted to be a housewife.

Misogynistic attitudes are evident in traditional Nigerian perspectives toward children’s gender. When Vicky, Adah’s first son, is hospitalized with meningitis, she panics: a boy is considered so much more valuable than a girl. Adah wonders how she could explain to this white English nurse “that though a girl may be counted as one child, to her people a boy was like four children put together.” To some extent, she has absorbed her culture’s gender prejudices.

Adah also rebels against the gender norms of her culture, however, by supporting her family financially and working to become a published author. Even though her husband thinks she is deluded because she is both a woman and Black, Adah is determined to write, just as she was once determined to gain an education.

For Adah, the state of motherhood is a double-edged sword. She dearly loves her children and gives her all to supporting them, keeping them happy, and ensuring that they can get an education. The children also present a seemingly insurmountable burden, however, because Adah is the only parent working and earning money. She must leave jobs she enjoys to give birth and find new jobs quickly afterward so that the family can stay afloat financially.

After undergoing a cesarean section during the delivery of her third child, Adah must rest and recover, and she determines to care only for her children and no longer waste her energy on worrying about Francis. She also decides that she will not have any more children. Despite her knowledge that she is in London to continue her education, she is not able to do so under her current circumstances. After Adah secretly obtains birth control, Francis finds out and forbids its use. She gives birth to a fourth child and learns she is pregnant with a fifth while she is finally in the process of leaving Francis.

Adah resolves to protect her children, which includes taking them away from Francis. When fighting Francis in court at the end of the novel, Adah tells the judge,

The children are mine, and that is enough. I shall never let them down as long as I am alive.

The novel presents an interesting parallel between Adah’s novel and her children, comparing the experience of giving birth to that of completing her book. Bill tells her that authors call their work their “brainchild,” a phrase in which Adah takes great pleasure.

Second-Class Citizen honestly portrays the struggles and outright failures that can accompany immigration. It is aspirational for Nigerians to go to London, receive a stellar education, and return to be powerful and successful in their native land. However, the novel suggests that this road to success is often very difficult, and many people do not achieve what they hope to after arriving in the UK.

Pa Noble is one such example. A Nigerian man, he strove to study in England and return to fanfare in Nigeria. Instead, he failed his law exams, injured himself doing manual labor, and now makes money by renting rooms in a rundown house. Francis, too, never passes his exams and does not achieve his goal of going into the Civil Service as an accountant. Adah is not able to pursue her education as she had planned, both because she must work and because she repeatedly becomes pregnant.

Even when they do honest work, it is difficult for immigrants to move up the socioeconomic ladder due to racial discrimination and xenophobia. While there is a sense of hope for Adah at the end of the novel, Emecheta gives a soberingly realistic view of what it was like to move from Lagos to London in the 1960s.