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Les fermes dans les prairies canadiennes sont léguées traditionnellement de père en fils afin d'en assurer la viabilité. Ce transfert intergénérationnel limite l'accès aux filles de ces agriculteurs surtout quand elles désirent agir indépendamment dans leur communauté. Cet article explore cette discrimination et examine la construction d'une fiducie comme un moyen de redresser cette injustice.
In Canadian rural culture, the "farmer's daughter" joke has been around forever.1 Predictable and formulaic in nature,2 these jokes are not sophisticated-the plot involves the seduction of the daughter by the stranger/traveling salesman while the humour is interjected when it turns out that the father, and perhaps the daughter herself, has manipulated the stranger into marriage.3 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 of jokes; the act of telling a joke tests if the 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. On 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."7 This pre-marital economic disparity has...