18/04/2026
I am the child of a woman who sold in Coronation Market.
So when I speak about market women, I am not speaking from abstraction. I am speaking from what I have seen for most of my life, and from what I know through my own mother.
And what I refuse is this shallow, fashionable claim that when women are active, persuasive, commercially sharp, confident, or commanding in the marketplace, they have somehow stepped outside of femininity and into masculinity.
No.
In Jamaica, the higgler tradition is not marginal to our history. It is one of the clearest public examples of Black women’s long commercial authority. And when placed beside the long history of women’s central roles in West African markets, what we are looking at is not some modern female corruption. We are looking at continuity. We are looking at retention. We are looking at inheritance.
That is why this rhetoric offends me.
It is an insult to our mothers and grandmothers to take the skill that fed families, sustained households, moved goods, held value, and shaped community life — and reduce it to “masculine hustle.”
Even worse is the attempt to connect that same quality to women’s pain and illness, as though a woman’s body must suffer because she is too active, too sharp, too capable, too present in the commercial life of the world.
That is not wisdom.
That is not healing.
That is blame.
Trade is not unwomanly.
Commercial tenacity is not unwomanly.
Persuasion is not unwomanly.
Knowing value is not unwomanly.
Being fully present in the economic fabric of your society is not unwomanly.
What I saw in Coronation Market was not an absence of femininity.
I saw women fully inhabiting their gifts.
