The novel explores the stifling nature of polygamous marriage for women in a Muslim society. Here, marriage is seen as a Freudian prison. Society is highly stratified and conservative, and husbands are seen as lords and masters over their wives who must be subject to them according to Quaranic injunctions. Women aspire to marriage as the ultimate goal in their lives and they expend so much energy to keep it because marriage seems to be the only way by which they can earn respect and affirmation in their societies. Thus, the dream of every young woman is to get married at all costs and their greatest fear is to be divorced by their husbands.

This is a great malady, and it is portrayed in the lives of the wives, especially the first two wives of the central male figure, Ibrahim, in Razinat Mohammed's novel, The Travails of a First Wife. The title of the novel is unpretentious; perhaps in fact, even too literal. But it makes its point directly, unencumbered by needless artifice. Zarah, the first wife, from all indications is long suffering and should long have left her marriage. Her husband treats her badly, and ignores her deepest emotional and sexual needs. To make the situation even direr, Ibrahim marries two new and younger wives and brings them into their home. He has robust sexual relations with them to the dismay and anguish of Zarah. Unfortunately for Zarah she is also a barren and childless woman. The truth however is that she has a son for her husband that both of them for certain reasons refuse to identify with, and her womb has also been destroyed through several abortions that she does to save Ibrahim's name before their marriage such that now they have a marriage in which she is unable to conceive any more children.