Feeding the City and Financing the Family: Women Market Traders in Suva, Fiji

Markets, whether centrally organized or ad hoc in nature, provide a critical source of income generation for women throughout the Pacific Island region. This chapter—based on research in the Suva Municipal Market, one of the largest and oldest of all Pacific Island markets—provides an overview of challenges faced by female traders in the everyday course of their work and home lives. The authors argue that a number of forces, including gendered intrahousehold power dynamics and the low status of feminized labor, continue to marginalize women market traders and create an exploitative labor environment despite their significant contributions to