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Her mother, Maxine Simpson, supported her three children by working as a higgler, a street vendor.

Her mother was a “higgler,” she said, who trawled the Jamaican countryside for surplus produce to resell at market.

The mode adopted by such men to draw the ignorant higgler into a dark room, where he was generally fleeced, was by assuring him that no one could see them, and as for a glass of old Tom, he would pay for that himself, merely for the pleasure of shewing his goods.

But the higgler went on; and another cart soon appeared, in which she had the pleasure to see a woman, driven by a boy.

In Guatemala City, market women and their kids and kinfolk make up 10% of the capital's 400,000 population; Lima's markets count 7,000 women; and in the island nation of Jamaica, nearly all the food-distribution system revolves around "higgler" women.