Have You Heard the One About the Farmer's Daughter? Gender Bias in the Intergenerational Transfer of Farm Land on the Canadian Prairies

In Canadian rural culture, the joke has been around forever.' Predictable and formulaic in nature: these jokes are not sophisticated-the plot involves the seduction of the daughter by the stranger1 traveling salesman while the humour is interjected when it turns out that the father, and perhaps the daughter herself, has manipulated the stranger into ma~riage.~ The father is seen to be successful in turning the tables on the young man. Why would anyone find this funny? Looking at the nature ofjokes; the act of tellinga joke tests ifthe audience displays the shared knowledge or social values imparted by the joke.4 The farmer's daughter joke would not be funny if one did not share certain perceptions of the farmer and his daughter. Humour is found in the incongruity of the expected result and the punch line in the joke5-we laugh at the unexpected. The underlying subtext is, however, that the daughter must rely on her cunning, physical attractiveness, and manipulative father to trap a husband and thereby secure her economic future. All of these jokes are premised on the idea that there is a need to marry off the daughter so she is no longer a burden on the farm's economic viability. Jokes such as these are a manifestation of the powerlessness of the farmer's daughter in much of Canadian rural culture. O n the prairies,6 farmland is often one of the few means by which to earn a livelihood as well as the largest family-held asset. Farm property is traditionally passed from father to son, often leaving a farmer's daughter with few resources. In Radchenko v. Radchenko the court acknowledged that if farmers' daughters brought any assets at all into the marriage, they were usually few and tended to be consumable when it recognized that this story is a typical one: the wife brought to the marriage a cow and a heifer.' This pre-marital economic disparity has farreaching implications for farm women. In the rural, male-dominated and often traditional environment, the farmer's daughter is particularly vulnerable. It is this pervasive lack of opportunity that one acknowledges, subconsciously or not, in finding humour in the farmer's daughter joke. This articlewill explore how traditional property rights, gender-specific property transferlinheritance practices, and a patriarchal culture have come together on the Canadian prairies to create a systemic gendered disempowerment of women in general and farmers' daughters in par t ic~lar .~ Acquiring property rights is a particularly important human rights issue9 because without property rights, individuals are unable toeffectively exercise other human rights.'' Inequality in land ownership is a major hindrance in correcting internationally recognized problems women face such as generally inferior economic status. Typically, Canada is not perceived as a country where such infringements exist. There are no formal legal restrictions to women acquiring property in Canada, in part due to legal and political recognition in the first few decades of the twentieth century and subsequent legislative changes.' Lawreform, however, does not operate in a vacuum independent of the various social relations, and patriarchy is one such set of relations.

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