What is a central idea or concept in the book Girl by Jamaica Kincaid?

The central theme is the idea of what it truly means to be a woman in all of her manifestations:  wife, mother, daughter.  The "self" is neglible as defined by the mother, and is seemingly only made relavant by a woman's role in relation to others.   The daughter, however, cannot accept such a narrow existence and struggles to define her own meaning of womanhood in a culture that is torn between the traditional expectations of a woman's "place" and her new reality of an integrated world.