Yea, I’m Going to Write About Name Changes Again.
Stephanie (one of my favorite bloggers/tweeters – you should check her out) pointed me to this Shakesville article yesterday that deals with the [radical] idea that, as feminists, we shouldn’t judge women who decide to take their husband’s name upon marriage.
Melissa outlines some great reasons here why we should not judge heterosexual, feminist women for changing their names, and I’ve been a huge advocate of the whole not judging people thing for some time. People often don’t believe that because I didn’t change my name and am not planning on doing so, but it’s true. I am pro-choice in every sense of the word – I will fight every day for women to have the right to choose whatever it is they want. Maybe the choices they make will not always be inherently “feminist,” but I’m not going to say that women should have the right to choose and then say “but this is really the only ‘choice’ you have.” That just seems counter-intuitive.
Interestingly, however, the article never explicitly says that we should respect women’s choices because we’ve fought so hard for the right to choose. Melissa hints toward this at the end of the article, but “Because she has the right to choose what’s best for her and her family” is not on her list of reasons why we shouldn’t judge women who change their names, and I think it definitely should be.
Obviously, I believe it is important for women to consider keeping their names upon marriage, or I wouldn’t have considered it myself. However, my reach stops there. If a woman decides to change her name, far be it from me to tell her she should do differently.
I would urge that the problem lies not in the women who make a conscious change, but in both the women who make the unconscious change and the men who put up such a fit about their future wives keeping their names that the women are left with the choice to change it or lose their partner. As a young woman who didn’t change her name, the two comments I’ve heard most often about the choice I made are either along the lines of “Well, why would you do that? Don’t you want to be a family?” or “Wow, that’s so cool. I wish I could do that, but my boyfriend said no.” Only amongst my feminist circle of friends have I heard “Cool” or “Good to know.” And only amongst my feminist friends have I been asked if I’m changing my name before I could even tell them I wasn’t.
Melissa writes:
But it’s eminently possible to critique the culture in which individual choices are made, and the cultural narratives that may affect our decision-making processes, without condemning those individual choices. Or the womanists/feminists making them.
I would argue that it’s not only possible to critique the culture and cultural narratives, but necessary. Many of my more progressive friends don’t believe me when I tell them some of the comments I’ve received, and I think lowering our guard on this one and thinking that this fight is over is one of the more dangerous things we could do.
Melissa hints toward this at the end of the article, but “Because she has the right to choose what’s best for her and her family” is not on her list of reasons why we shouldn’t judge women who change their names, and I think it definitely should be.
Absolutely. I have friends who changed their names upon marriage, and I have friends who didn’t. All of them put a lot of thought into it, as did I when I got married. I chose to take my husband’s last name, because it was important to me personally to signal that I was transferring my primary allegiance from my birth family to the new family that my husband and I were creating together. Do I think that my friends who kept their names are less committed to their marriages than I? No, absolutely not. But it was meaningful to me to do this, in the same way that it might be meaningful for someone to get a tattoo to commemorate a major event in her life.
Aw, you’re making me blush. Guess I better get to writing more, huh?
This subject tends to be a very touchy one and people can take questioning as a personal attack. So, I feel I have to apologise in advance for my question.
While I can fully appreciate the sentiment of this reason, it still troubles me. I’ve never heard a man express such a point of view, still less actually change his name to reflect it. Few men would even consider such a change to their identity*. It only ever seems to be women who feel the need to show to the wider world that they are ‘committed’ or are now a ‘unit’.
Obviously, our culture pre-disposes us all, men and women, to certain modes of behaviour, but it still genuinely puzzles me why, after 5 decades of modern feminism, women still feel this symbolic gesture is still important to them in a way it clearly isn’t to men.
(* I use the word advisedly; as in Name=that by which you are identified. I am not trying to suggest that ones name defines your character or personality.)
I’d also like to note that there are families in which the woman changes her name specifically because she does not wish to have any ties to her old family name. My mother is a survivor of abuse and incest and, even though she is a very traditional Christian and would have changed her name anyway, she felt it was empowering to abandon the name of the father who raped her. I would never, ever deny someone that.
Sylphstorm; I would not disagree with anything you’ve written there, but it still begs a question.
By sheer dint of statistics, there must be as many men who had abusive fathers (or indeed, mothers) as women. True, I would guess that fewer boys than girls have been sexually molested or raped by their father, but other kinds of abuse can still have been perpetrated. Yet, what I find interesting is that men tend not to see their surname as being to blame. Even when their own father has treated them appallingly, they still tend not to shed their surname.
I’m not making any judgement as to whether or not they should do, merely that men and women obviously view surnames differently. I might even postulate that men see their surname as belonging to them – where/who ever it came from – whereas women do not. Clearly, as this cannot be genetic*, society has imbued the surname with a characteristic that is essentially male and, therefore, of less importance for women.
Personally, I would like it if women regarded their surname as being theirs by right, belonging to them as much as their prospective husband’s name belongs to him. To keep or change, as they see fit.
(* surnames are too young for evolution to have encoded them into our genes.)
That is an interesting thought, Cycleboy. I do agree with the sentiment, in that I view my surname in precisely the same way that you do. However, I can understand how people, really, both male and female, would want to change a name that they might associate with abuse and trauma, and a family who permitted as much. Getting married and changing one’s name is just a convenient way to do so in a society in which name-changing under other circumstances isn’t common.
I am married for the second time. I changed my name the first time, only to find that, when we separated, it was actually not legal in two of the states in which I lived for me to change my name without a legal divorce. Mind you, if I wanted to change my name to Pop Tarts I could have done so freely, but I could not change my name back to my maiden name without a legal divorce because, apparently, my name was the property of my ex-husband.
I was very angry at this and, after changing my name and getting the legal divorce, I am on my second marriage. I have my name again, and I’m not changing it. If my daughter wants to adopt the name of my husband in addition to mine when she is old enough to understand the full implications of the name change, then she has our full blessing, but I learned hard the value of my name and I’m not throwing it away, nor would I tell anyone else what they should do with theirs or what reasons are acceptable.
Sylphstorm: an interesting and salutary tale.
I can’t say what would happen here in the UK, but I suspect a woman does not need her ex-husband’s permission to change her name, or even a divorce certificate. The idea that a surname is the ‘property’ of the husband sounds alien to me, but I may be ignorant of the legalities in this case.
While I understand your scruples about telling others what they should do, I do worry that some people are unaware of the ramifications of the decisions they make. As a consequence, I feel threads like this one can be useful forums for explaining the pros and cons for others to consider.
Though it can appear didactic to some, I don’t feel too embarrassed to question someone’s decision – when their reasons might be open to question. For example, I’ve often seen women state, “what’s so feminist about holding on to one man’s name instead of another’s?” I feel I’m justified in stating my belief that your surname is as much yours as your father’s (reasoning as I did earlier). Not by way of explicit critisism, but by putting forward an alternative way of looking at the situation.