HUCKSTERS, HIGGLERS AND HIGH-BROW WOMEN; CONSTRUCTING CONNECTIONSACROSS CLASS AND CULTURE BOUNDARIES: A CASE FOR GENDER COLLABORATIONWITH MULTITUDE VOICES

ALEXANDRA BURTON-JAMES PhDNational Louis UniversityEvanston, Illinois

Presented at The Caribbean Shukes Association XV111 th Annual Conference

May 25-29, 1993

HUCKSTERS, HIGGLERS AND HIGH-BROW WOMEN; CONSTRUCTING CONNECTIONS

ACROSS CLASS AND CULTURE BOUNDARIES: A CASE FOR GENDER COLLABORATION

WITH MULTITUDE VOICES

Commenting on the achievement of the Hucksters Association of Dominica, a leading government

minister said to the predominantly women members 6-1 believe you are easily the best organized group of

people in this trade in the Caribbean* (March, 1990). A few months after this remark was made, ten women

hucksters from that very organization were drowned at sea due to the inadequate and inappropriate boating

facilities they are forced to use in trading between the islands. To date, the inter-island journeys that hucksters

make on a daily/weekly basis remain high risk business', fraught with all kinds of difficulties, which according

these women range from *rejection of our loads* to the lack of "right papers'—legal documents needed to clear

goods from the customs and/or to enter an island. In addition, high travel expenditures and the physical

harassment that hucksters experience threaten to deter women from this traditional form of trading. In spite

of this, huckstering has been, and continues to be, a cultural space that poor urban and rural women have

claimed for participation in economic activities within and between the islands.

This is tangible evidence that some aspects of this organization of women successfully challenge

powerful social systems to create opportunities for personal and collective assertion otherwise not available.

The social dynamics to the hucksters' circumstances strongly suggest that women's movements are fundamental

to social transformation and progress in the Caribbean. Hence, development policies, programs and community

action must necessarily incorporate women's diverse voices and their differentiated perspectives on how

development is to proceed. It also raisef the questions: How specifically do the hucksters localized practices

and organization operate to challenge patriarchal marketing and social relations that inherently marginalize

women? How singular and different are the material relations and practices of the hucksters relative to other

women groups as high brow women—the educated/middle-class, and the higglers—the peanut sellers at street

corners?

In this paper, I present four interrelated arguments: first, there is the general case to be made for the

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view of Caribbean women as important agents in the struggle against patriarchy as an ongoing and

differentiated forms of social action, as distinct from prescriptive solutions. Second, a compelling case can be

made for the construction of diverse partnerships that negate the boundaries of class, culture and gender

positioning. Third, women must seize the lead to create coalitions that use existing partnerships among women,

to capture the historical collaboration and pragmatism of Caribbean women. Such alliances, as for example

between hucksters, higglers, and high brow women, can explore how to develop and sustain power relations

that articulate the centrality of their collective voices. Fourth, whilst women propel the impetus towards day-to-

day practices that contest patriarchy and the reproduction of gender/culture domination, it is ethical to exhort

women to be cognizant of, and act against class and gender inequities that threaten to subordinate a high

percentage of males in the Caribbean society.

Perspectives Defined

To me one of the most compelling challenges for women of the 21 century can be articulated by two

central questions. First, how do we, women, overcome the restrictions and the politics of gender inherent in

patriarchy to create public space for cultural and subjective assertion? Secondly, How do we use our energy

and commitment to freedom to cultivate mutual cooperation and a sense of common purpose and good for

all? In reality terms: can hucksters, higglers and high-brow work collaboratively' to create power relations

that promote equitable access, control and the distribution of resources available to us as a people?

This social inquiry focuses on women's critical interpretations and draws on women's voices as they

talk of the their realities, in their particular historical context. Through examining women's stories I highlight

how they define truth and identify the uniqueness of their interpretations to Caribbean cultural practices and

how the nature of these practices can be altered to overcome gross inequities. From this perspective of women

as history makers, I explore the possibilities of building and reinforcing dialogue, community networks and

cooperation across class, race and gender boundaries to create a paradigm of collaboration that strengthen the

political positioning of women.

The following discussion acknowledges the important contributions to the critical, cultural and

epistemological analyses by Caribbean and African women writers who use literary and historical analysis to

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confront patriarchal hegemony (Davies, 1981, Mathurin, 1978), invisibility (Lionnet, 1993) and the allocation

of marginalization along gender, racial or class lines ( Cobham, 1993; P. Marshall, 1983). Such an inquiry does

not associate with the assumption of some feminists, that, in order to move away from the male dominated

structures, all we need to do is to present and adopt women representation, as if they are uncontaminated by

existing structures. My experiences among some North American and English feminists have shown me that

women, by nature, can not claim to have humanist ideals and practices that are less controlling than man-made

traditions. In addition, the woman-headed, patriarchal government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of

Britain, and Eugenia Charles of Dominica cautions against such biological determinism and essentialism.

Rather, these occurrences alert us to the need for alternative perspective in the serious investigation, and

praxis.

Triumphant Trading Traditions:

Historically, Caribbean women use everyday practices to assert cultural continuity and forms of gender

subjectivity that reject "masculine subordination" and the 'dominant ideological pattern' (Davies, 1983, p.12).

The localized history of women's social action indicates that women mobilize their energy to create sites of

power that contest the notion that power is unitary and static. With this in mind the text interrogates the

cultural positioning and differentiated realities of hucksters, higglers and high brow women. The authentic and

diverse ways that each group/class use to construct their social space and reject the totality of patriarchy is the

nucleus of my critical reflections.

The contemporary pattern to huckstering, inter-island trading within and between the islands, and

higgling, side-walk tray selling, is not new in the Caribbean. This trading pattern continues to be owned,

sustained and expanded by low income people with little or no capitaL The hucksters organization consists of

predominantly women who come from the landless subsistence farms, poor urban women, and more recently,

unemployed male youths. These individuals are self-employed in diverse economic activities that incorporate

bargaining, battering, and selling of produce—"marchendie"--at the street, national and regional level. Through

the collective efforts of "women for women" the huckster and higgling trade in Dominica and most of the

Caribbean Islands has grown into a vibrant and self-sustaining economic activity, with an expanding membership

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and the potential for political strength. Commenting at a commemoration on the achievement of the Hucksters

Association of Dominica, a leading government minister said to the mostly women members in March, 1990

".I believe you have perhaps easily, the best organized group of people in this trade in the Caribbean. There

is no question about that". (The New Chronicle, 1990). Members are praised extensively by the prime Minister

and other leading officials for their high level of trade and the increasing number of boats used to trade local

produce between islands.

Higgling, the street corner and more humble activity, is not as lucrative nor is it as nationally

acknowledged as huckstering. Nonetheless, higglers eventually graduate to be hucksters after years of

persistent, arduous selling-marcendie. As these women entrepreneurs shuttle from island to island, street

corner to street corner in the process of the umarchendie" of goods, they acquire marketing astuteness, and

an array of financial and negotiating skills that transform bargaining/battering into a fine art I know many

women including my 'Taunt Alice", whose higgling activities began with the selling of exotic flowers, mountain

grown vegetables and brightly colored glass beads. She progressed to become a powerful umarchendiese and

community activist. Customary to her time, she always wore a conspicuous 'tete case' and "robe duette', the

traditional Caribbean headdress and dress which accentuated her African Caribbean pride. She died when I

was just 5 years, notwithstanding, I use memories of her tall, upright, confident self, and the ways in which she

accumulated wealth, knowledge and status, as one of my primary frames of reference.

Contemporary higglers go on to own popular and profitable restaurants, grocery shops, fashionable

boutiques and a few become involved in politics at national level This infiltration of women continue to grow

and dominate that clothing and distribution trade. These low income women use the economic space to

cultivate direct contact with the chambers of commerce in the respective islands, interacting with leading

merchants and interaction with high profile politicians as the occasion cited.

The day-to-day social transactions involved in trading foster among these women a high degree of

collaboration, loyalties, strong friendship ties, individual trust, reliance on each other, and the integrity of the

association as an entity that leads the way. According to many huckster women 'it is knowing that we are there

for each other, and, if I fall down you will pick me up" that gives the individual a fearless incentive to to move

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on, and at the same time to belong to de association". The group alliance and reliance is exemplified through

the practice of buying goods or purchasing produce for each other whenever someone cannot 'make the grade'

either from the lack of money or from being sick. Ma Bell claims ' Praise God, I am alive today' whilst her

huckster collegue Ma Denise Is gone'. Ironically and mournfully she indicates that she would have been both

dead from a drowning accident, (details below) had it not been for the fact 'I gave Ma devise to sell produce

for me as I did not have a heavy enough load to make the passage': That week her goods did not warrant

a profitable trip. Sadly, she weeps for her friend and continues, ' the risky trips because I have to make a

living". The group ethos of 'two heads are better than one' "I do for you and you for me' is the basis to self

/group survival and the overall expansion and of their trade, it can also have serious consequences.

The determination and power to act on behalf of the individual or collectively for the group is

reminiscent of Caribbean women in early history. Mathurin (1975) contextualizes the cultural traditions of this

market system and its contributions to female self-esteem, real economic power, and triumph gender

contestation. She notes *despite the strenuous and brutal work day, slaves found time and energy to work their

garden plots allocated to them by West Indian slave laws. Comprising of mainly women, not only did they feed

themselves on yams, dasheen and other vegetables they grew, but had crops left over. The slaves therefore

sold their surplus produce in the local markets of Bridgetown, Castries and other West Indian towns and

gradually became the main suppliers of foodstuffs for the white households' (op.cit. pp. 19).

Rather than submit to marginalization, poverty and a life dominated by the brutality, the horror of

slavery and gender positioning that exclude women from economic activities, female slaves, as with hucksters

and higglers assert their subjectivity by making connections to their African and Carib legacy of value of and

the centrality of women in the community. With its deep roots in African marketing heritage (Diop, 1975),

hucksters and higglers sustain the control and growth of the region's "informal economy' and marketing system.

In addition, many of these women are also central to the material and emotional upkeep of their households,

embodying a cultural pattern in which 50-60 percent of all Caribbean households are headed by women (

Antrobus, 1987). Women's increased awareness of their situation, and their conviction to act, to search for

possibilities, demonstrate that along class and gender linesa..40& they utilize their cultural heritage of collective

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action, that is pivotal to African, Carib and our localized Caribbean history of survival and movement forward

together (James, 1963).

Though victimized by patriarchal, economic, and other social structures that tend to perpetuate our

invisibility through silence; though our bodies have been dehumanize from forms of objectivity and

commodification doing all kinds of unacknowledged work : farm work, office work, intellectual work selling

fish work, raising children work, sex work, community work, church work and more work, women have actively

and continue to deny peripherality. Throughout history, they have assert their subjective, gendered selves use

it to promote thier interests and the interest of those they love, and those who are their partners in trade,

dance or play.

In spite of the normalizing practices of patriarchy to exclude the poor, in particular poor women, from

being at the center of economic activities the huckster and higgling trade is constructed by women as a

relatively "safe public space. Through their complex actions, and tenacious connections among themselves,

poor women make significant progress at the personal and public level, and simultaneouslycreate an alternative

representation of womanhood mediated by cultural practices.

Paradoxically, the social and economic gains of women in the categories above and the situation of women

in general does not just happen, nor is this reality a glowing actuality. Everyday events, especially two recent

incidents, precipitate conflicts concerning the sustenance of this tradition and the circumstances of women in

general.

The Politics of The Poor: 'No problem Hucksters Can Do Better"

The huckster and higgling trade involve contradictory experiences which evoke consequences that are

at times double edged for participants. A few months subsequent to the celebration cited above, ten women

hucksters were drowned. The young male hucksters swam several miles to the nearest island. And, only in

March of this year (1993) two month's ago, another boat transporting huckster's goods capsized at sea. To

date, the inter-island journeys that Hucksters make on a daily/weekly basis remain 'a high risk business, that

we have to do ". Women in the the business assured me that it is fraught with all kinds of difficulties, ranging

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from "having to sleep rough at sea' and "no time to eat or look beautiful hie other women' to more painful

events as death of a friend, 'rejection of our loads' to the lack of 'right papers'—legal documents needed to

clear goods from customs or to sell produce from Island. High travel expenditures, the physical harassment

that hucksters experience from day-to-day make some women very very weary and disempowered. Recently,

off-shore industries, such as hucksters' involvement in the selling and buying of packing boxes for the banana

industry threaten to erode the fundamental principals and the nature of 'women ownership" of this trade and

women's control of space for autonomous trading and self assertion. The prime minister of Dominica, Miss

Charles, is quoted as saying she looks forward to the period when the Hucksters association is controlled "very

strictly" by standards "under the eagle eye of persons who run DMA" (the Chronicle, op.cite)

I fear women may be slowly driven from the center of this industry by practices of modern industries

that work actively to suppress and eventually drive out women and thier traditional activites from the center,

to make space for the interests of capital and corporate trading. Similar forms of suppression and are being

socially promoted to drive Higglers out of their meager but indispensable activities. According to the powerful

government persons, "higgling needs to be prohibited, as it is an abuse and misuse of urban sidewalks and

pedestrian space'. During a visit to Barbados and Jamaica last year, I listened to government information

program that severely restricted higgling on beaches and street corners. Higglers I spoke to resentfully said

"they want to destroy we" "they want to take de island and leave we out of it'. These women were also

cognizant of long term intentions of 'them in power" who aim to eliminate "any way the locale can make a

dollar". The higglers' fears were confirmed by a tourist official who indicated that 'the higgling business

tarnishes the image and practices of tourism that we in the Caribbean want to promote among visitors to de

islands'. Correctional procedures are used to control those who harass or persistently solicit tourists through

higgling. Meanwhile unemployment, low level domestic work, exploitative off-shore employment or prostitution

in the tourist industry remains alternatives for these women.

The fatal accidents and numerous daily frustrations that traders face are due partly to non-intervention:

"stab in the back" and or "snake politics". The ship owners and government are directly responsible for their

failure to rigorously control the general and specific maintenance of boats to ensure they are sea-worthy.

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Though it may not have been their intention, both parties' gross neglect of facilities used by the public have

mutually supported each others' actions. This calumniated to act against the interests (fatally so) of Hucksters

and low-income people who use these facilities. I must point out here that a considerable number of

Dominicans and other island people use this form of cheaper travel ( in comparison to exhoribant inter-island

air fares) to neighboring Islands for a variety of low-wage work, and to visit friends and relatives.

Alternatively, we can ask the question: why do ship-owners relinquish the responsiblity needed in

managing of sea-worthy ships for public safety ? Operating in conjunction with other institutions, patriarchal

policies and bureaucratic routines (or lack-there-of) continue to reproduce injustices that deeply affect the lives

of poor people. In particular, associations that harbor poor women are more prone to being affected by the

varying forms of marginalization on gender and class lines. Studies of banking in the Dominica ( and probably

throughout the Caribbean) indicated a trend in which male dominated corporates are more hiely to be

allocated loans and funding than industries that are owned or controlled by women. Despite their relative

economic impact, and government rhetoric cited above, the huckster's association is not one of the industries

to receive annual financial backing from the Regional Caribbean Bank. Such entrenched fiscal traditions

channel the majority of Caribbean women (and men), to low paid wage labor on plantations, low status civil

or domestic service (maids), or to be employed in exploitative jobs at off-shore economic enclaves that provide

a haven of cheap unmonitored labor. As with other third world counties, Caribbean govermental policies tend

to exclude off-shore international industries from the enforcement of local labor laws and contracts that protect

workers.

Notwithstanding the confidence and strides that low income women such as hucksters and higglers have

made, the position of women in general is therefore similar to the condition of women from other developing

countries: women constitute a large percentage of the poor, the illiterate, and the underemployed and they

remain a small minority at the margins of political power. On moment-to-moment basis, women contest this

kind of power relations that produce such gross oppression and viewpoint that women are powerless or that

they have power to do certain things and not others. Rather than submit to structural instances of inequality

that jeopardize their very lives, hucksters for example fight back with multiple consciousness of people who take

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responsibility for the risks, anxiety and directions of their lives. Their collective determination is unashamedly

encapsulated in the association's motto 'No problem, Hucksters can do better'. The onus for action is based

here on challenging that which they know, and acknowledging that there is room for improvement. In other

words, they reflect on their contextualized operations, and themselves relative to processes they endure and

succeed at, and do not accept pre-determined parameters set by others. In giving public voice to the statement

'Hucksters can do better" as their Motto, these women validate the extent to which they are cognizant that they

must act on the social relations and practices that restrict their personal lives and collective livelihood.

The double-edged positioning of high brow women, the educated few, illustrate similar forms of

personal and collaborative engagement. The emerging variance and alliances to the biography of high brow

women accentuate how the Caribbean women used their legacy to create alternative representations of

subjective and localized spaces for enacting power.

High brow women Bounded by Powerful Boundaries

Education is one of the most important patriarchal institutions that simultaneouslyworks to diffuse and

transform the localized power that women and common folk have historically generated. Paradoxically, women

use the social opportunities therein to construct new or different possibilities to their cultural and personal

articulation. The majority of women (and men) have access to, and can only complete a primary or elementary

school education, as access to secondary education is limited by the elite nature of an inherited British

education system. Subsequent to the era of educational expansion in the 60's and 70's, women seized the newly

formed cultural space to propel themselves to become the emerging educated group . Despite structural

conventions in schools that inherently differentiate and allocate on gender and class lines, ( Drayton, and

Patricia Mohammed 1982), available statistics imply that throughout the Caribbean, women dominate every

level of academic achievement in the school system from primary to college level ( Cole, 1982). Women have

also mobilized themselves to constitute 50-60 percent of the educators and civil servants in the Caribbean. A

small percentage of this group pursue tertiary education and take up professions at universities and colleges

or join bureaucratic institutions at national or regional level, in careers such as in social services, education, law

and politics. They are the group whom I refer to as High Brow.

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Positioned at the apex of patriarchal institutions, with its ideology of inequity, high brow women

challenge and reconstruct gender and cultural exclusion and discrimination that they routinely encounter. As

with hucksters, and higglers, high brow women are severely constrained and limited by structural traditions, in

social areas of knowledge considered to be of high status. For example, women are over-represented in

disciplines considered "soft" as the humanities, whilst they are excluded from the 'hard' sciences (Drayton et

al, op. cite). Similarly, though women are a large percent of faculty in academe their numbers decrease

significantly in the adminstrative sector and at sites where 'real' power and salaries are invariably higher. It

is for these reasons above all else that high brow women in education have become involved in critical, cultural

research and analysis that explore the social and historical connections of knowledge to power and how power

works to control knowledge and its accessibility in the context of Canbbean schools. Such investigations

increase self-understanding in the system, and helps to explicate how day-to-day practices in eduction harbor

and reproduce dicriminatory and exclusionary practices (Drayton et al, 1982; Burton-James, 1993).

Women's literary and scholarly discourses also interrogate the processes that furnish gross patterns of

inequality. Female authors ( Lorde, 1989 ; Marshall, 1990; Delamonte, 1993; Christian, 1980) as well as male

Canbben authors ( James, 1953, Lamming, 1953;) write extensively on the social positioning and efforts of

Caribbean women as active agents, who confront their social positioning. Cobham's (1993) analysis, for

example, demonstrates how women gain enlightment and reflect on the intersection between their personal

lives and how they are regarded within professional institutions and the wider society. She notes: "the

Caribbean writer's insistence on the presence of aggression and the negation in the lives of their protagonists,

while affirming their potential for initiating change, differentiates their work also from all but the most

experimental mainstream feminist writers. Patriarchy and colonialism may be bogeymen, but the narratives

make it clear that the women themselves have participated in reproducing the system and that the power they

possess to challenge the system has often been won by their complicity within it" ( Callaloo, 16.1 44-64).

According to this author, women are highly cognizant of the disabling consequences of bureaucracy.

Sequentially they develop strategies to learn the system and invent ways with which to overcome being silenced,

marginalized or pushed into gender specific roles.

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Regional and localized women seminars, where high brow women come together, have become integral

to the processes by which these women gain in depth understanding of their contextualized struggles. Through

ongoing dialogue they collectively investigate each other's personal and public concerns, their creative work

and their specific contributions to history and cultural productivity. At 'The Third International Caribbean

Women Writers Conference' (1992) participants critically probed the theme 'The Caribbean and Female Vision

for the Twenty First Century*. It was in the words of one of the organizers ' a forum for debate on gender

issues' with women contributors from diverse disciplines and professions ranging from literary criticism, health

care, law, sociology, television production to pupperty. A challenge for the 21 century called for collaborative

action and literary discourses that include the `voices" of all Caribbean women be they hucksters,

chambermaids, teenage mothers(Linda Bodejo, 1993, p.67-71) Anglophone or Francophone 3. Regional events

such as these also provide opportunities to gather and compare data that contest the accepted and taken-for-

grantedness to existing practices of sexism, classism, light colorism, and other forms of marginalization. Most

significant is the fact that seminars offer possibilities for personal and social cohesion, that lead women to the

search for alternatives to the oppressive structures and the philosophies that are part of our daily existence.

Though expected to work in the interest of the institutions and for the dominant who control power

and resources, many high brow women have become increasingly involved in oppositional politics. It is not

always very easy to endorse or act on what some consider lofty perspectives and ideals. Nonetheless, there are

numerous activist women groups who conceptualize and implement grassroots projects that promote elective

forms of employment and creative expressions to gender subjectivity among rural/urban poor women and men.

Examples of such work include: The Women and Development Unit, Extra-Mural Department of the

University of the West Indies, various women organizations funded by non-government agencies, women

dominated village councils and the diverse religious women groups are integral to the cohesion among different

class/ethnic groups of women.

The establishment of various Women's Bureau in the respective Islands, were initiated to begin with,

by some high brow concerns for their less educated and disadvantaged Vrnallell county women. To date, the

managerial and some field operations of these bureau continue to be administered by high brow women in their

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effort to alleviate the poor social condition of many women. Though limited by their philosophy, and public

criticism for self interest bureaucratic ideals in that they claim be non-political, the direct intervention of the

bureau's out-reach programs, have contributed significantly to poor women being increasingly included in the

islands economic and social development The affirmmation of the relative well being of women in St vincent

( The Commonwealth poster, 1990) and Grenada (before the revolution) is attributed to the work of the

women's bureau, in collaboration with the women's Development unit of the University of the West Indies

whilst under the leadership of Peggy Antrobus (1986).

The numerous and tenacious instances juxtapose the quality of women's direct involvement in groups

promote that collaboration among women of different histories and social situations. In the process of working

towards a unified front in their respective groups, women refute personal, gender and class regulation that are

exerted by forces outside of their lives. The diverse women groups with their various purposes validate the

axiom that women value the interface of middle and working class concerns. High brow women's formal and

informal group interaction indicate an oreintation to be engaged in social struggles with a political agenda that

is reflective in a broader social spectrum, and not based solely on individual social mobility or self

enhancement

Conclusion

At all levels of the society, and within each of the groups I examined women confront many personal,

political and economic battles on a day-to day-basis. As such, the power and plausibility for oppression of the

macro society is constantly there, actively working to keep women in their place. Caribbean women

acknowledge and understand the logistics and fragmentation of gendering as part of their felt experiences.

Congruently, the realities of different women groups confirm the trusim that women continue to construct

public spaces, and so create possibilities that confront oppression, the construction of othernes and

social/economic marginalization.

Contractorily, social change as precipitated by educational institutions and industrialization processes

construct boundaries that work in conjunction with certain patriarchal traditions to divide and rule. I hightlight

here recurring instances of essentialism: Caribbean Chinese women in collision with Indian, Creole looking

12

down on Carib women; African Caribbean distant from Coolie women. Emerging categories of differentiation

threaten to separate the majority of poor working class Caribbean women: hucksters, hinters, from a middle

class high brow and Caribbean women from Caribean men. Strongly held cultural identities does not negate

cooperation and increased awareness of gender as a factor in the social dynamics. In fact it substantiate the

In our search for identity and cultural unity, Caribbean women need to continue to surmount the

fragmentation and alienation of modern life that contributes to the various boundaries that keep us apart from

each other. Our Historical and contempoary experiences of "unity is strenght' has provided us with the rich

hertigate for collaboration and powerful articulation. Women's pragmatic action, their political will and

epistemology indicate that they are equipped to pursue forms of interdependence that negate class, gender and

culture essentialism. Historical and contemporary conter-hegemonic involvement has inadvertently prepared

them to take the lead at this critical moment in our history as we point ourselves towards equity.

NotesThe Women and Development Unit (WAND) is a center that was established in 1970, tocoordinate and promote women's activities. Wand set out to "Break down the geographicaland political factors that..isolated Caribbean women from (one) another in order to buildsolidarity among them and increase their contribution to the social and economic developmentof the region, support programs and projects that would improve the socio-economicconditionof women, raise the level of consciousness and awareness of the realities of women's lives, andidentify the skills and programs existing in the region (in order to) facilitate regional andtechnical cooperation (Antrobus quoted in Yudelman, 1987).

2. I did not attend this conference. Thanks to the Callaloo's edition ( Callaloo 16.1 (1993) 65-71 )devoted to Caribbean Women Writers I was able to read about the significant events. I now sharesome of the topics that were discussed: "The demystification of Gender Roles"; TheMother/Grandmotheras a role Model'; The Single Mother and her Experience'; The Internalizationof Class, Color, Colonial and Gender Oppression in the Writing of the Caribbean Women's Writers';'The Educational Messages on Emotions Conveyed By Children's Literature';

3. The featured issue Callaloo volume 16, 1 (1993) presented the literary works of Francophonewomen writers. The guest edito notes ' We have tried to bridge the gap and connect thecreativity of African and Caribbean women's writers, and in doing so, to illuminate theircontributions to the artistic production of the African and the Caribbean' (p. 75-76)

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