Doing the “Bad Job” to Make a Living and Expose Men: Economic Critique Voiced in Folktales by Marginalised Women

This chapter analyses a folktale from Crete, Greece, with obvious Venetian/Italian influences, which presents the economy from the point of view of a young woman who saves the life of her lover and breaks up with her family and privileges. When he forgets her, she is already in a foreign country, where she announces that she is a courtesan in order to acquire (pre)payments that will allow her to survive. Her plan to take the money of the royal customers and deny her services leads to a court hearing in which from defendant she becomes the accuser. To analyse this folktale, the study uses feminist economics and grassroots economics, i.e., theory and practice, which exist among everyday people and communities, in spaces which are more informed by communal life than by established or mainstream economic thinking. The study follows the learning process as set up by the narrator and reveals the organised structure of the community story-telling practice in terms of examining economic activity and calling out injustices that most people do not want to discuss. The choice of the storyteller to centre courtesanship or sex work and the woman who is providing that work shows how the poverty of women and the entitlement of men through money are functioning in the economy in both social and legal terms. It also shows how the formal economic education has missed important aspects of gender, injustice, systemic violence and hierarchy.