Dvance p raise for minding Their Own Business

Barbados
by Beckles (1989), who gives the background of small business 
development among the free men and women who were allowed to 
grow their own crops during slavery. The image of this “huckster or 
higgler” is captured in a 19th-century photo essay by Harry Hamilton 
Johnston, “Woman Selling Jack Fruit” (1908–09) that was restored for 

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5
public consumption by the Royal Geographic Society. In that exhibit 
there is a photo of a black, female vegetable seller with her produce set 
out around her. The foundation for the enterprising female women in 
the Caribbean islands also has a sister development in the story of the 
lives of such women as Sojourner Truth (McKissack & McKissack, 1994) 
and Harriet Tubman (Clinton, 2005). The latter, famous for her effort to 
free slaves from plantations and escort them to new homes in northern 
states of their country, saved money from her own business efforts so 
that she could buy her freedom from the plantation owner and take 
other members of her family and community away from captivity.
Another image of the enterprising female who was documented to 
be among the most rebellious women during slavery is captured in the 
harrowing tale that Dionne Brand related in the novel At the Full Change 
of the Moon
(Brand, 2000). The story uncovers the little known history of 
a slave rebellion in Trinidad. The protagonist is Marie-Ursule who reput-
edly coordinated a mass slave suicide in 1823. This work is based on 
research done in Trinidad and is an echo of the documentation that Beck-
les (1989) provided in his description of the outstanding level of punish-
ment that was meted out to the female slaves in Trinidad. These Trini-
dadian women were militant, resisting the inhuman practices of slavery, 
and as a result they were harshly abused in comparison to the level of 
punishment meted out to female slaves in other Caribbean islands.
By the 1990s women in Trinidad and Tobago had asserted them-
selves to the extent that they were insistent that laws protected them 
against sexual violence and declared the need for women to have more 
control over their bodies (Reddock, 1994). The consistent attention to 
the role of education in the steady climb to higher status in the society 
paid off for the African and Indian descendants of the earliest settlers 
in the twin-island nation. The evolution of the trade unions movement 
would have affected the families of all of the five women described in 
this study. But this does not negate, or registers as less important, the 
fact that most of the women accounted for in formal labor statistics 
have been, and continue to survive as, independent laborers. This labor 
network is supported mostly through an underground system that 
involves trading in small goods, personal services, and domestic work.

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6
minding
their
own
business
Financial Literacy
According to Becchetti, Caiazza, and Coviello (2013), financial literacy 
helps people to improve their understanding of a financial product 
and ideas through information, “instruction and/or objective advice, 
develop the skills and confidence to become more aware of financial 
risks and opportunities” so that they make informed choices, know 
who to ask for help, and eventually take actions to improve their finan-
cial status (p. 818).
Grohman, Kouwenberg, and Menkhoff (2015) have written about 
the childhood routs of financial literacy. They state that financial social-
ization, counting family, schools, and work as the major facilitators, 
predicts informed financial decisions. The authors assert that family 
and schooling work through mutual channels to affect financial behav-
ior. They also contend that financial behavior is connected with “per-
sonal and societal circumstances” (p. 116) and not easily affected by 
trainings that are short term in later life.
MacKenzie (1992) reported that entrepreneurship must be fostered 
in the social context of the community that enables the environment 
for such education. Acquiring new knowledge is a journey of extract-
ing and then organizing information from experiences so that it leads 
to systems that collect new information (Holcom, Ireland, Holmes, & 
Hitt, 2009). In the manner in which the five businesswomen go about 
building their businesses, we witness their ability to gather and use 
information that informs their choices so that they can increase their 
success in their individual operations.
These five women, Gina, Gee, Nadine, Fona, and Maria, had no 
formal training in financial literacy. Each of their backgrounds as gain-
fully employed women in different kinds of employment provided them 
with experiences that prepared them to think about money and its use in 
a productive life. Before the advent of the independent business adven-
ture Gina worked as a manager for a firm, Fona was a bank manager, 
Nadine worked in a retail before she left Canada for the USA, Maria was 
a journalist in two countries, and Gee was a secretary in an international 
firm until she retired. More importantly, these five women were raised in 

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what could be considered middle-class home in Trinidad. Their school-
ing can best be understood as that which children in parochial schools 
are exposed in the USA. They were educated to be the leaders in any 
field that they decided to learn and develop in adulthood.
Krishnan (2016) raises a question of the necessity of schooling as a 
means to “raise the cognitive and logical reasoning in a person” (p. 187). 
Other authors report that various forms of literacy come from and are 
responsive to local situations (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Heath, 1983; Hull, 
1997; Luff, Hindmarsh, & Heath, 2000). Literacy, in its diverse expres-
sions, is situated within a special set of human actions and behaviors and 
therefore the prejudice against nontraditional forms of reading and writ-
ing cannot be substantiated (Krishnan, 2016). Street (1995) recognized 
that the literacy practices of a community must be understood in the 
context of the site in which the forms of expression are used. Appreciat-
ing how a practice is understood and adapted to the needs of the society 
in which it belongs is an effort to make visible what may not be obvious 
to the mindset of those who come to the research site with a view that is 
formed by the dominant culture’s stereotypes of literate citizens. Further, 
it is important to note the level of passion that a successful entrepreneur 
brings to the task at hand. Cardon and Kirk (2015) make a strong case for 
the fact that it is “the focused entrepreneurial passion that most deter-
mines who will persist in their entrepreneurial pursuits” (p. 1045).
Method