Name Changes and Privilege
Yesterday, Emily from Gender Across Borders graciously allowed me to cross post her article about changing her name for my series about feminism and relationships. You all, gentle readers, were very nice in the comments over here. Emily wasn’t so lucky with her commenters over at GAB. (Check out the comments here.) And, while I normally would not take the time to write a full-out post inspired by commenters, I do feel that this issue needs a little more attention.
Let’s be clear before we go any further: I have written before about how I’ve decided not to change my name when I get married. But – and this probably won’t surprise you – I’m not one of those feminists who thinks that any woman who does change her name is reversing decades of feminist activism.
There are people out there, though, who do believe that women should absolutely never ever change their names – apparently for any reason whatsoever. And some of those views were reflected in the comments on Emily’s GAB post yesterday.
Honestly, deciding to change one’s name isn’t just about “the feminist choice” versus “the traditional choice.” People change their names for a multitude of reasons, not just because they’re getting married. And those reasons, no matter what they are, are almost always intensely personal. To say that one should use that personal choice to make a larger, political statement because it would be “perverse” (taken from the comments of the original article) not to is, simply, ignorant of any variants of the man-and-woman-getting-married scenario.
Sure, you could argue that anyone has the choice to change one’s name, but what happens when real life kicks in and that option isn’t really viable anymore? What about someone like the woman who sat next to me in my grad class who couldn’t get a job and felt she had to change her surname to her middle name to avoid racial discrimination? What about any of the instances in this Tumblr discussion, which I’m linking to because I don’t think I could ever say it any better.
The fact of the matter is that simply having the choice to change one’s name upon getting married is a privilege, and the very discussion itself almost reeks of upper-middle class, heterosexual, cis, white privilege. Think about it: To even suggest that someone, anyone, should keep a name with which they do not identify – whether that is because they’ve married a man and want to take his name or because their family name was changed at Ellis Island before they were even born and they want to go back to the original family name or for any of the other plethora of intensely personal reasons out there to change one’s name – just to make a political statement is simply reciting dictum from a feminist textbook and ignoring the larger issues and nuances of life.
And, frankly, if a woman does decide to make that name change to her husband’s name, to say that she is “subservient to your husband’s needs” or “losing your identity” (again, from the GAB comments) are such gross over generalizations. And assumptions! You can change your name and still be your own person. Gosh, so many of us write under pseudonyms on the internet; do those pseudonyms make us any less us when we write? Absolutely not, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference if we chose to legally change our names to our pseudonyms, either. It’s all about what you identify with, and, really, by changing your name to one that you identify with, you might just be gaining your identity rather than losing it – and isn’t that really what feminism is all about?
Personally, I identify with my last name, which is why I’m keeping it. It isn’t some broad, political statement. It’s simply because this name is who I am, and Tim loves me – all of me – as a whole person, and that love includes my name and my desire to keep it. And I feel the same way about him and his name, which is why, when he offered to change it for me, I said he shouldn’t do that unless he really identified with my name or a hyphenated/combo variant. (He decided he didn’t identify with my name or a variant of our two names. Hence, we are keeping our own.) But, again, the discussion was about identities, not traditions and politics.
OK, readers, that’s just my two cents. I welcome all points of view on this blog, and if you have a lot to say, please consider submitting a guest post on the subject. But, if you must comment here, please be mindful of the multitude of situations the name change debate affects, not just the man-and-woman-marry, woman-takes-man’s-name scenario.
Although I mostly agree with you–we all make compromises to the patriarchy, and as far as those compromises go, name-changing upon the occasion of marriage is a relatively innocuous one. (Not to mention, I also firmly believe that we’re working against ourselves when we direct so much attention to criticizing women for the compromises they make rather than directing the attention at the systems that enforce these “choices.”)
However, I think you should be careful when conflating different situations with name-changing. The type of name-changing that feminists decry happens when two people get married and the woman changes her last name to the man’s last name. Of course, as you’ve pointed out several times, there are other situations where a name-changes happen that have nothing to do with the patriarchy. (Or even to correct something the patriarchy broke–for example, when an acquaintance of mine and her mother finally escaped her abusive father, they both changed their names back to her mother’s maiden name.) But that’s not the sort of thing feminists are talking about when they say women shouldn’t change their names. Sure, the argument seems really privileged asshole-y when you take it out of context, but you really can’t just conflate name changes that happen because of marriage with name changes that happen for other reasons. Feminists don’t argue against the latter. I know Clarissa can be caustic at times, but even she didn’t make that argument.
The one changing-your-name-is-a-privilege argument which could potentially work in context is, of course, the fact that in many places in the world LGBT people still can’t marry at all. The discussion on whether it’s helpful for allies to refrain from marrying until everyone can is a useful one to have, but whether or not cis hetero women decide to change their names upon a marriage they’ve already decided to enter has nothing to do with this debate. Furthermore, most queer weddings don’t have quite the same gender dynamics as hetero weddings (which spouse changes hir name to match the other spouse is not, in many cases, prescribed), so any decision made about name-changing is likely to be much more equitable than those that happen in “traditional” marriages.
Yes, I totally agree with you that the name change of a woman when marrying a man is totally different than most of the other situations mentioned, but the principle of the matter remains the same. Hopefully, you wouldn’t tell an LGBTQ person not to change his/her name to identify with their partner; you wouldn’t tell my classmate how to identify (or not identify) with her ethnicity. So why tell a woman not to identify with her husband? The situations are different, but it’s still about identity, and taking away choice when it comes to identity is very dangerous, no matter the situation.
The principle of the matter really doesn’t remain the same, though. Your claim that applying the same principle to two wildly divergent situations wouldn’t hold up under the slightest bit of scrutiny.
Don’t get me wrong; I agree with your argument in general. Taking or not taking her husband’s name doesn’t fundamentally change anything about a woman’s character, and some feminists are disproportionately alarmist about the whole issue. There are valid arguments to be made for your point. “Changing your name is a privilege,” however, is not one of them. And like I said before, the argument that “you wouldn’t tell an LGBTQ person not to change his/her name to identify with their partner” doesn’t hold any water either, because (as I’ve already mentioned), the gender dynamics are totally different. There’s no centuries-old tradition saying that the shorter husband becomes the property of the taller husband at the time of marriage and therefore should take the taller husband’s name, or anything. And as for the example of your classmate, it bears no resemblance to the marriage name-change debate at all. You’re comparing apples and oranges here.
Changing your name to better identify with your ethnicity is all about identifying with something that is part of YOU. It is also a freely-made, not societally-expected choice, as opposed to the marriage name-change situation, which is surrounded in history and expectations, and often winds up being one of those socially-programmed “choices” that isn’t a real choice at all. And identifying with one’s husband (a separate, distinct human being) is not at all the same as identifying with a certain aspect of one’s OWN heritage.
I think we are actually totally on the same page here, because I totally agree with you. I’m just trying to reinforce two things here: 1. Any kind of prescriptive feminism can be dangerous. When someone says “don’t ever change your name! It’s YOURS!”, they don’t often take into consideration other contexts. Yes, those contexts are totally different, but feminists telling other feminists what the feminist thing to do is often ends up being just as restrictive as the patriarchy we’re fighting against. And 2. Any choice is usually very personal, and if someone makes that choice after careful consideration of politics, larger moral issues, and smaller personal ones and comes to the right choice for them after all that careful consideration, that should be ok. It’s when we start blindly making choices that it becomes a problem, whether those choices are made blindly reinforcing the patriarchy or blindly following “feminist doctrine.”
ahhh I <3 you, this is a great post and I really think you hit the nail on the head with this issue.
THIS:
" if a woman does decide to make that name change to her husband’s name, to say that she is “subservient to your husband’s needs” or “losing your identity” (again, from the GAB comments) are such gross over generalizations. And assumptions! You can change your name and still be your own person."
I could not agree more.
As always, wonderful post. There are many reasons (which you outline) which can make a person attached to, make them want to distance themselves from or just be ambivalent about the name on their birth certificate.
Your points about changing last names at Ellis Island and pseudonyms is especially great in pointing out that in this time and place the decision is much broader than the historical marital implications.
As I’ve posted elsewhere, of course the right to keep or change your surname is one that should be fully supported.
The only thing that slightly worries me is when one looks at the statistics. The reasons people give for changing their surname can be very valid (abusive family, horrible name, slave history etc) but all these reasons apply to PEOPLE. Yet, somehow it is only women who ever seem to have abusive fathers or a horrible surname. I’m sure it has happened, but personally I’ve never heard of a man who’s said, “I couldn’t wait to get married so I could get rid of my horrible name.” But why not?
When something like 90% of women getting married are changing their surnames, you do have to wonder. Of course, individually, there will be women with very understandable reasons for doing so. But, as I said above, those reasons OUGHT to be equally valid for both men and women, yet the statistics suggest otherwise.
That is an excellent point. I wonder if it due to the lack of perceived choices for men within the patriarchy. Since it was never a choice that had to be fought for its not thought of as an option for many men at all?