On a recent trip back to Sudan and Saudi Arabia to visit family, all my paternal uncles came to visit me. In Arab cultural tradition, they became my guardians when my father died – even though I now spend most of my time in London. As we met, I braced myself for awkward questions about the "impropriety" of living away from home and what would surely be the inevitable demand that I return.

In fact, none of these were forthcoming. My uncles were polite and even a little curious about the nature of my work. Feeling that I had perhaps underestimated them, I breathed a sigh of relief, but then one of my paternal aunts appeared and said, unflinchingly and with an unsettlingly full sense of entitlement, "So, when are you coming back?"

I stumbled in my response and looked to my mother, but she offered no support. "Yes Nesrine, when?"

As a younger Arab/African woman growing up in a large traditional family, I always felt sympathy for my older female relatives. I saw them as victims, like the broken-winged Amina in the Cairo Trilogy, banished to her mother's house for daring to leave her marital home to pray in the mosque without her husband's permission. If the women in my family were ever mean-spirited, bitter or excessively voyeuristic – relishing scandal – I attributed this to their unhappiness and lack of fulfilment.

It seemed to me ironic that there was such a romantic view of women, particularly mothers, in Arab and African culture. When the Prophet Muhammad was asked "Where do you find paradise?" he reportedly answered: "Paradise lies at the feet of mothers." In another famous hadith, frequently cited to rebut claims that Islam is inherently chauvinist, the prophet answers the question, "Who among my kinfolk is worthy of my good companionship?" He replies, "Your mother" three times before saying, "Your father."

As I grew older and became more familiar with the world of women, I saw the men in my family as less and less the petty female-obsessed guardians of the status quo and more like its final enforcers. When my Sudanese female cousin recently wed a white Canadian, the women of the family were whispering nastily on the wedding night at how the standards of the family had fallen, while the men maintained silence in the face of a fait accompli. The mothers, aunts and grandmothers mocked or criticised the men's silence behind their backs and saw themselves as the family's moral foundations, with the men wielding only material and physical power.

I began to see that women were not the devoid-of-volition players I once thought they were. In fact, the most dominant forces in the subjugation of women appeared to be the older and more established women.

While it is relatively easy for girls to build up the reserves of energy to confront emotionally distant fathers, uncles and other men in their lives, it is difficult to oppose female relatives, especially mothers who are in principle on your side, but in family politics are actually aligned elsewhere. When I was at school, it was not our fathers we feared when we were up to no good, but our mothers who were acutely attuned to those telltale changes in behaviour that only a mother can spot. This soft, tactile power is subtle. If men are the brute enforcers, mothers are the thought police, patrolling their daughter's mind, while other female relatives alert her to anything she might have missed.

Cue the ubiquitous, fussy, interfering Auntie-ji character – matchmaking and meddling. While they may not be quite the kind who carry around photo albums of potential husbands (prevalent in Punjabi society) they still abound in Arab families. A veritable Rolodex of social networks, suitors and pithy one-liners (my own bete noire's favourite saying is "If you don't have what you like, then like what you have"), they are specialists in character assassination, deflating your achievements and, most infuriatingly, pressurising your mother just when you had talked her into talking your father round.

This goes beyond the pervasive fear that someone, somewhere – younger, of course – might be having fun. In my experience at least, even fulfilled and apparently liberal-minded women seem to bristle at younger ones challenging the status quo, or more precisely, challenging more of the status quo than they had done, stripping them of whatever forward-thinking uniqueness they imagined they had. A relative of mine, who became a pioneer in the 1970s by studying at a university in the US, was one of the main objectors to my studying in London, on the grounds that when she did it she was with a mahram (male guardian).

The crossover point seems to be marriage. The happily unmarried woman is treated like an off-road vehicle that may damage and challenge the tidy spaces of married women who have arrived and finally inherited some role of authority, some credibility that they so painfully lacked when single.

While this smug Bridget Jones divide may not be unique to more traditional societies, it further reinforces a barrier to female emancipation, a frontier that is less tangible, less exposed in the media and much more emotionally challenging.