What are the points of patriarchal society that shows the sufferings of women, the oppression and their emancipation?

Tambu's gender is at first a restriction for her education, as well. Nhamo rubs her face in the fact that he is to receive an education at the mission school while she must stay at the family farm with Jeremiah, pointing out the obvious: "Why are you jealous anyway? Did you ever hear of a girl being taken away to school?" As a narrator, Tambu concludes that her brother was "sincere in his bigotry. But in those days I took a rosy view of male nature," so she assumed he was just saying hurtful things to bother her.

Tambu the narrator (as opposed to Tambu the character in the time when the story takes place) realizes that, while the women listen to the meeting of the patriarchy, "what was needed in that kitchen was a combination of Maiguru's detachment and Lucia's direction." But the problem was that the women have been conditioned to understand themselves a certain way, as "images that were really no more than reflections... it was frightening now to even begin to think that, the very facts which set them apart as a group, as women, as a certain kind of person, were only myths; frightening to acknowledge that generations of threat and assault and neglect had battered these myths into the extreme, dividing reality they faced."