Conceptualizing women workers in the tertiary sector of Third World economies poses certain problems. Researchers disagree as to the class position, productive activity and political consciousness characteristic of these workers. Focusing on women in small-scale commerce, a growing population in the cities of many underdeveloped areas, this paper questions some commonly held views and suggests a need to refine our analysis of women in the distributive trades and the services. As one effort in this direction, the results of research on marketers in a provincial city in Peru are presented to show that while there is some ambiguity in the class status of market women owing to the various forms of their participation in the capitalist economy, they may be termed productive workers with evident potential for mobilization.
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