I’m the luckiest girl alive! He asked me to change my name, but said we could pretend it wasn’t patriarchal.
As I began to say, I did a squirrel wheel thought exercise with the dangers that supposedly threaten the patriarchal family: abortion, homosexuals wanting to get married, single mothers having children, lesbians having children without a father, mothers having jobs. Notice something very interesting? Nothing a heterosexual man might do is construed as a threat to the patriarchal family. Even extramarital sex and such is just fun and games for the men, but a real problem when women join in without the proper feelings of guilt and the needed societal shaming.
Point taken, but there is one thing that a heterosexual man can do that is treated like a gigantic threat, and that’s willingly refuse male privilege. That’s when he meets a stone wall of resistance. For instance, there’s a lawsuit that the ACLU is taking on right now because a California man tried to change his last name to his wife’s last name and found that the law makes such a thing very hard on men but easy on women.
As Michael Buday saw it, the road to matrimonial bliss was a nontraditional one that included taking on his wife’s last name, reports the Feminist Daily News Wire. Problem is, according to a lawsuit filed on his behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union, in California men are required to pay upward of $300, file a court petition and advertise their name change for a month in the local newspaper; a woman, in contrast, can change her name through marriage by simply paying a $50 to $80 filing fee. Buday also says he was ridiculed when he tried to legally take his wife’s last name at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
I was shocked to find out that there’s still intense legal pressure to adopt the patriarchal name change, but according the the press release, such pressure is the rule, not the exception.
Only six states — Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York, and North Dakota — allow men to take their wives’ last name on the marriage application. These applications also allow for a hyphenation or name merge (the latter was an option chosen by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, formerly Antonio Villar, and his wife, who was born Corina Raigosa). In Illinois, it costs men a total of $396 to take their wives’ names.
I’ve always been something of an asshole on this subject, mostly because I dislike the intellectually dishonest excuses that people make to imply that a woman changing her name upon marriage is anything but a fairly pointless exercise in male ego-fluffing at the expense of her dignity. Not that I think you’re a bad feminist if you do it, but be honest about that fact that it’s a public show of obsequiousness of the most blatant form. So are high heels and I wear those. Hell, I wear those despite the complaints of boyfriends in the past who preferred displays of female subservience that didn’t slow down how fast we could walk. We’re all guilty, so that’s not the issue. The issue is the amount of effort put into pretending that the name change isn’t sexist. I’ve heard all the excuses as to why any one woman’s decision to change her name isn’t caving to sexism.
- It’s better for everyone in the family to have the same last name.
- What about the kids?
- Hyphenation is stupid.
- I don’t like my last name anyway.
- Both last names are patriarchal, so why does it matter?
All of these are clearly excuses for one reason and one reason only—if you think a name change is necessary, you can have the man change his name. It’s an elegant solution. Not only do you have all the perceived benefits, but you are sticking it to the patriarchy. This solution even works if you’re employing the “I don’t like my last name anyway” thing, because if there’s a lot of people out there who dislike their last names, then the odds are strongly in favor of the fact that half of them will be men. But for some reason, when this discussion comes up, women and women only seem to dislike their last names. But really, for the rest, there’s no issue at all—name the children after the mother, name the husband after his wife, just switch everything around and you’re done. For some reason, that elegant solution never seems to come into play.
My guess is that there’s very few men like Buday who are willing to do what all sorts of women do, which is say, “Gosh, It’s better for everyone in the family to have the same last name/What about the kids?/Hyphenation is stupid/I don’t like my last name anyway/Both last names are patriarchal, so why does it matter.” Ask a man to do it, and suddenly it’s a symbol of submission and a joke at the Department of Motor Vehicles about who wears the pants in the family.
182 Responses to “Even in liberal California, men apparently don’t abandon privilege very often”
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I repeat: Mozilla-Pujols.
A friend of mine with five brothers married an only child up in Trinity county, CA. I don’t remember him having any problems changing his name in the process.
All their kids have the family name. One set of grandparents is very happy, the other is totally cool.
This must be a county-by-county thing, no? Or maybe the laws have actually changed or been “clarified” in a patriarchal direction in the last seventeen years.
Hell yeah, New York state! That’s awesome. I like the idea of a name merger, just to fuck with peoples’ heads. The cutest name scheme I ever saw was a set of twins, where the boy had the mom’s last name and the girl had the dad’s last name. Awwww.
Seriously, though, I think the tide is slowly turning on this kind of thing. My mom hyphenated (and de-hyphenated on divorce), and I outright refuse to change my name for a guy.
Ms Kate, you can do it if you’re a man. You just have to go through a big process, the same as if you were changing your name for non-marital reasons. For a woman, all she has to do is indicate it on her marriage license.
Well, that’s what it’s really about, isn’t it? No one ever snickered at a woman behind her back for changing her last name.
Personally I do know of at least one couple who followed the recent trend of having both spouses do the hyphenation thing, but if your names are, say, hypersyllabic Balkan monstrosities, that might not go over so well. I just say: why bother with the name-changing at all?
A friend of mine who is marrying a foreign national without permanent residency was pressured to change her name by her lawyer, saying that the marriage was less likely to be challenged by the authorities if she did so. Apparently you’re only committed to the marriage if you change your name.
Thank you thank you thank you.
They are all bullshit excuses. *Especially* the “they’re both patriarchal.” Your last name doesn’t belong to your dad, it belongs to you, unless you consider that it doesn’t belong to your dad but your grandfather, except no, it belongs to *his* dad, no, *his* dad, and so on… Why do even *feminists* fall into the trap of assuming that because you inherited a name from your father it is “his” name and not yours? If inheriting it from your father means it’s not your name, then it’s not *his* name either, because he inherited it, and so on.
All my children have my husband’s last name, for three reasons: the two oldest are biologically his and had their names before I showed up, so I wanted the second two to match; the names start with C, whereas mine starts with R; and they are actually a very cool last name, whereas mine is boring. But mine is MINE. Boring, yes, often confused with guys who wear sweaters in the neighborhood or pseudo cowboys, yes, occasionally misspelled, yes, alphabetically pretty far down, uh-huh. But MINE. Mine mine mine. “Alara Rogers” is me, not “Alara some name from some guy I met when I was 30″, and I just can’t comprehend how, when it *does* cost a filing fee and takes a lot of bureaucratic nonsense, why do so many women *do* this?
As for the guy who wants to change his name, more power to him, and I totally hope he wins his lawsuit. It’s not the changing of names I oppose so much as the societal expectation that it’s the woman who will do it.
Here’s a good one: a couple of women that I know out here in California were told when they went in to the Social Security Office to change their names that they were NOT allowed to keep their maiden name as their middle name. For Homeland Security reasons. They would have to do the ultra-traditional change of dropping their maiden name entirely and slotting in their husband’s name.
How this can possibly be justified as a “Homeland Security” change, I’m still scratching my head about. Wouldn’t it be easier to keep track of someone who retains at least part of her original name so the government isn’t confused when Heather Marie Jones and Heather Marie Smith both marry guys named Johnson, so you now have two Heather Marie Johnsons?
Best part, of course — they went back a second time and talked to a different clerk and were allowed to do it, no problem. But this happened to at least two different people that I know of, so it’s not a matter of it just being one asshole of a SSA clerk.
Oh, and I did not change my name when I got married in July. Though if we ever get around to having kiddos, they’ll probably have his last name, because our two names would be atrocious hyphenated together. (Imagine a last name like “Soprano-McGillicuddy.” Seriously, that level of ethnic confusion.) I do keep threatening to hyphenate the cats’ names, just because it would be funny to hear the vet staff call for “Boris Soprano-McGillicuddy.”
My full name is Loren Michael Burnes-Hicks.
That is, they named me after the producer of Saturday Night Live, and did the hyphenation thing.
It would have been so, so much easier had they just named me after Lorne Michaels straight up and not given a shit about either of their names. Plain, simple Loren Michael is such an elegant name!
Instead, I came out of it with an annoying mouthful and now I’m the one who has to pay the cash to abandon this trainwreck that follows me everywhere. The fact that I’m in college (and in paperwork hell) just compounds the problem.
Won’t anyone think of the children? Just name us after a favorite celebrity and end it right there. Hell, I would have been infinitely pleased to have a number for a last name. Loren the First has a wonderful historical ring to it.
Name changing automatically to your husband’s last name = stupid. But it is true that the vast majority of women’s last names are patriarchal already. Part of the reason I agreed to my first husband’s endless nag to change my name was that I decided if I had to wear a man’s name, I’d rather it was his than my father’s. (The other part was he wore me down with the aforementioned endless nagging.) I’ve considered the patriarchal issue and its application to kids…obviously hyphenating has a definite generational limit, you really don’t want to end up with a grandkid named Elena Smith-Jones-Brown-Johnson. Name merges, same issue. I vote we start picking our kids’ last names just like we pick first and middle names, render marital name changes obsolete and wipe out the whole issue in a single generation.
My husband and I both kept our names (maybe that’s why we had the extra investigation when he went for his green card, hmmm…I hadn’t thought of that). Anyway, he offered to change his name, but the idea of being married to a man with the same last name as my abusive father yucked me at the time, so I said no. Over the past ten years, my last name has become so much my own that I’d be happy for him to take it now - oh well. My younger sister changed her name because she didn’t want the same last name as the asshole, and I really can’t blame her.
My Favorite Story on this subject (it bears repeating): A couple deciding to marry (real people that I know, btw) discussed the whole name-change thing. The gentleman in question said, ” I Know! Let’s BOTH change our names!! To “The Jetsons”!!”
Ever since I heard this story, I think it is the PERFECT solution. Of course it would be BEST if EVERYONE changed their names to “The Jetsons”, but for the new couple to pick a different name (other then “Jetson”) they both adore, and then BOTH change seems like a great solution to ME. (And so Romantic!!)
(I feel I should add that I am a name snob to some degree. I read in the paper about a guy named “Harry Butt” or a lady named “Ima Hogg” and I think “Why Don’t they Change their names?!?!?
I mean, NO ONE has to go throught life named “Hortense Woodcock” or ” Thomas Cum”. ANYONE can change their name. You don’t have to go through life witha terrible name! And if you are a male person with a ridiculous or unpronouncable name, by all MEANS change it to your wife’s name.
I DO realize that some people are attatched to their name, even if it is just an awful name, because of their family history or because they don’t want to upset the parents or grandparents. I know, I know. But the whole naming thing is arbitrary anyway. At some point Jack, Robin’s son became Jack Robinson and his daughter became Rose Robinson instead of Rose Jacksdaughter. It was Arbitrary! Plus if your forebears emigrated to the USA the Ellis Island folks usually got it wrong anyway.)
I’d change my name, sure. My father was an abusive fuckwit and I don’t think he deserves to have his name plastered all over the good things I’m doing with my life. But I wouldn’t change it for marriage. I’d change it to my mother’s maiden name. I have never in my life heard of such crap over marriage. I know when transsexuals change their names, they often have to pay hundreds of dollars, go before a judge, and run a notice in the paper. But for a person getting married? I’m not sure whether I’m more appalled that the woman doesn’t have to go through the rigamole (I just assumed the expense was included in the cost of having a wedding) or that the man does.
My husband and I chose a new name and then both changed ours to that, which has worked out really well for us. Also, we have twin daughters, and their middle names are the first names of our mothers– so we can hoenstly say our family names are not patriarchal, but matriarchal!
And yes, it was a lot more trouble for him to do it, and he got a lot more social-shit about it, from family and strangers alike, and yes, his willingness to do it anyway shows just what a cool man I married.
Can I plead lack of feminist awareness as a reason for taking my husband’s name? At 22, though much more aware than I had been at 18, it still just seemed like the thing to do when I got married. I only remember one person asking me about hyphenating but I felt Maples-Loats just had far too many Ls and Ss. Keeping my own name by itself didn’t even come up (very conservative rural Michigan).
And at that time there was no charge other than the fee for our marriage license, which would have been $25 either way.
I’m a big fan of the name fusion thing. There’s two philosophers at MIT, Stephen Yablo and Sally Haslanger, who fused their names and are now the “Yablangers”. It’s hard to say without smiling.
Actually this is not so. My husband and I were married in California 20 years ago and he changed his last name to mine. There were no fees, no special rules and no difficulties. He simply went into the Social Security office and said he was changing his name–signed and filled out the forms. Then he went to the DMV and did the same. After we were married we just started using his new last name on all the bills, accounts etc. Even getting a passport was not a problem. The rules were exactly the same for him as they would have been for me.
Anon,
Shelly Rae Clift
I seem to remember that the Idaho license had a place for both of our married names more than 20 years ago. Has that changed? Maybe just a Gem county thing? And it was not a simple matter to change my name anywhere except the social security office. I didn’t get my driver’s license changed over for a decade, just added the new last name at the end of the signature.
Husband’s name - common English word 4 letters long, only a family name for about 4 generations before his (so no big deal to him)
My now middle name - 7 letters; always misspelled, ususally mispronounced; my father’s to whom I harbored ill will; I had already used my step-father’s at one point in order to register for school earlier and get the classes I wanted.
Some of us just aren’t that attached to our last names.
I chose to change my name for one very simple reason: I felt (and still feel) more at home in my husband’s family than I did in my family. I consciously decided to join my husband’s family instead of “merge” our families. (My family was dysfunctional and in another state; his family is the most supportive, loving, functional group of people I know. I didn’t agonize about the decision at all.)
Oh, there is one other thing: As a female is a Patriarchy that is currently being challenged, I have the right to use my maiden name OR my married name! It is like having a LEGAL ALIAS!
Sometimes I use my maiden “rockstar” name (Kathy McCarty) and other times when I want to be more anonymous I use some variation of my “Married” name (Kate Thornberry, or Kathleen Thornberry, or even Mrs. David Thornberry). Apparently, All are legal! So that’s kind of a plus… I know this state of affairs probably won’t last generations (that married females can use more than one name) but it is the case right now.
“My husband and I chose a new name and then both changed ours to that, which has worked out really well for us.”
so you CAN do that? geez, why doesnt everyone just do that instead. that sounds great.
“There’s two philosophers at MIT, Stephen Yablo and Sally Haslanger, who fused their names and are now the “Yablangersâ€?.”
and thats an even more awesome idea! my name is brown and my fiances is may and that hyphenated is just…ugh.
Oops I meant “as a female IN a patriarchy that is currently being challenged”.
also I might be among a VERY small number of people who are thrilled to have a few legal aliases. You know, cause it makes me feel like a spy or something. It’s kinda Juvenile, but I FULLY admit to being somewhat juvenile.
*Thank you*! This has always bugged the crap out of me, too. I kept my name, he kept his and we agreed the girl kids would get my last name and the boy kids his before we had them; we ended up with one of each; there have never been any problems; it’s all fair; and everyone’s happy. You just have to call a spade a spade and put your foot down.
No one ever snickered at a woman behind her back for changing her last name.
The patriarchy is no friend to a good man.
My fiance and I considered making a new name for ourselves when we got married, but it seemed awfully complicated, since she’s a published writer. Since she’s going to keep her name, it sure does make sense for me to take her name as well. I wasn’t aware of the ridiculous crap I’ll have to go through to do so. (I am also in California, so I have a certain stake in the outcome of this case.)
if I had to wear a man’s name, I’d rather it was his than my father’s
It’s not his last name. It’s his father’s EXACTLY like yours is your father’s.
If I don’t like inheriting my father’s name, and I don’t, I don’t know why I’m supposed to be any happier at inheriting somebody else’s father’s name. A man’s name is not his if yours is not yours.
Also, the wife’s mother’s birth name is always available for people who hate their fathers for whatever reason.
My first husband absolutely insisted on the name change, and the pastor at our church threatened not to do the wedding if I wouldn’t change my name. As it turns out, I probably should have called his bluff. I was still struggling with my ideas on feminism and my place in the world at the time, though, so I acquiesced, and did the best I could to try to rationalize it and come up with intelligent reasons for me to have changed my name.
Over the years, that name change irked me, and I resented the hell out of him for it. And I felt like an idiot and a coward for going along with it. I mentioned the idea of paying to have my name changed back, and he flipped out. He was a big believer in the “headship” of the husband, so if I were to change my name, it would give the appearance of him “losing control” at home.
When I divorced him, I had the name change written into the decree, and he paid for it.
I’m married now to a guy who would never have considered having me change my name. It just didn’t figure into his thinking. What a concept.
Anyway, I love this story. I’m so glad someone is challenging this garbage. It amazes me to see this kind of crap in CA, given the reputation for producing “moonbeam” types.
I always felt really strongly against changing my last name. I’m Eastern European, so some last names actually have meaning and mine is one of those. My friends used to tease me about it. Once, when I was pretty young (11, 12) someone said “well, it is a weird name, but you’ll change it once you’re married” and I remember saying “why would I want to do that?” When I got married, the issue never even came up. I don’t know what we’re going to do if we have kids, because of the potential for endless hyphenation someone brought up earlier. And I doubt I would ever want more than one child, so one kid with my name and one with my husbands’ probably isn’t an option. My name it is, then!
What I do hate with a passion is getting cards that are addressed to both of us, with my last name changed to his. From relatives. Who were at our wedding. And know damn well not only that I didn’t change my name, but also how I feel about name-changing. Thankfully, there are only one or two of those, so I usually rage for five minutes and forget about it (although I do pointedly address our cards in both our names).
A friend of mine wrote her MA thesis on the legal history of women who refused to take their husband’s name in the US. The 1970s were a real watershed — prior to that point in some states it was legally mandated that a woman take her husband’s name.
I agonized over the last name issue way more than I should’ve, in retrospect. My gut said “Don’t change it,” but various pressures from various sources (my husband was definitely not one of them though, bless his heart) made that decision harder than it really needed to be.
In the one conversation I had with my husband about it, the only option he felt strongly against was taking my last name, because it sounded funny to him. But this is also why he totally did not mind in the least that I felt the same way about taking his.
We almost both took his mother’s maiden name, but then our laziness won the day and neither of us changed our names at all. I am so glad that’s how it wound up, now. I would’ve missed my name, even if his mother’s maiden name is a really cool one.
I still get comments, though. Still! It’s been over three years, people! Get over it! I would really, really appreciate my mother-in-law moving on (her latest hope is that I’ll change it when we have the kids we’re not planning on ever having), but them’s the breaks, I guess. She’s cool otherwise, I have no idea why this is a big deal for her. Maybe she misses her awesome maiden name!
I’m not keen on hyphenating the names unless both partners do it. When just the woman does it, it looks like a compromise.
Mr Magpie and I don’t have children, so no issues there. I would insist on hyphenating our names as a last name for the children. He would strongly object. Of course, he would also want to name a son Xerxes and a girl Antigone, so it’s better we have avoided that little donnybrook altogether.
As for multi-generational hyphenated names, I figured out the solution some 20 years ago. When two people with hyphenated names marry, they each contribute a single surname to make a new hyphenated name. Sally Smith-Weisenhammerschlach and Kamil Chin-Tantanello become Sally and Kamil Smith-Tantanello. Or Smith-Chin. Or Weisenhammerschlach-Tantanello. Whatever works.
ah, the ‘ol “yer mother’s maiden name”.
frankly, I don’t want to inflict that 13-letter, rude bodypart involving, german blunderbuss of a name on anyone.
My mother kept it when she married my father. I got my father’s name.
It’s true, though. I don’t feel anyone should have to give up their name for the oh-so-wonderful joy of marrying my dumb ass, but, then, what do I do with the kids? the same thing my parents did?
But I don’t think it was a big process for him, even. I mean, their wedding was under the redwood trees at a hostel for an entire 3 day weekend and we had lots of time to discuss everthing about the wedding with the bride and groom and all the guests. Obviously, the topic of the unusual name change was something people talked about. Maybe I just don’t remember that detail.
BTW, the wife did change her middle name to the husband’s pre-marriage name, and he also took his old last name as a middle name. That way, both of them have each other’s names. The kids got her family name, which is simpler than if they had to carry around something unwieldy and hyphenated for their whole lives.
My husband took my name. I was a little surprised: I announced I was keeping my own, he said “oh, I’ll take it then.”
He had good reasons for his choice. He was the only person he knew with his now-”maiden” name (we actually call it that, because it’s cute). He never knew his father or father’s family and his mother had remarried and mostly taken her second husband’s name.
So this is what makes sense for us. I’d say that people should do whatever makes sense for them, but I agree with you that far too many women just somehow prefer their husband’s last names to their own. Statistically a little strange, no?
Well, I’m Muslim and brown, which means that our family’s (extremely common) last name has been getting red-flagged recently. My 15 year old brother, who has the most religious sounding name, has all sorts of problems getting his pacifist NDP-supporting ass on a place.
So if I were to somehow marry my boyfriend, I’d be willing to give my kid’s a different last name from mine. Being red-flagged sucks. Just adding a racism-based dimension.
Combining, though? That would make our last name “Ahmedieson,” pronounced “A medicine.” We’ve been snickering about how it sounds for the last ten minutes.
On a plane, not on a place. (Sorry for double-posting. It just makes no sense.)
It always creeps me out when bank clerks ask for my “mother’s maiden name”. I always imagine an SS officer asking it, with a leer, sure he’s found a closet Jew.
My husband and I both kept our names (maybe that’s why we had the extra investigation when he went for his green card, hmmm…I hadn’t thought of that).
No, you had the extra investigation because no red blooded American woman would ever marry a foreign man unless he was paying her!
My college coop was visited and everybody was asked 10,000 really rude and nosy questions about a malaysian man marrying a US woman. Never mind that they had been sweethearts for three years.
This never happened the two times male residents married foreign brides, just when the women married the men.
The patriarchy rears it’s ugly head yet again.
This issue is something that bugs me. I have no intention of giving up my name, and at the same time, I have no intention of making anyone else give up or alter theirs.
which is all well and good as far as it goes; we just keep our names. Inertia is easy, by definition.
so then, what with the kids? that’s where it gets tricky.
Why am I still in moderation? Dagnabit.
I have a gigantically stupid last name. It’s Welsh, but not actually Welsh, it’s like the Welsh appropriation of a French name. I’ve been catching crap for it since I was in first grade. My mother’s maiden is Slater. I was like, you couldn’t've thought of the children? C. Slater is ever so much less cruel. I always say to my girlfriend that I’ll take her name if we marry- since hyphenating would have to actually involve my name.
Our two friends want to take on a new name together, I think it’s a really cute idea. Since my friend A’s last name is a kind of nut, and her girlfriend, friend B, is a native Spanish speaker, they say they’ll change it to the nut- in Spanish.
My fiancee and I have been having this very conversation. We’re both fond of our current last names, find hyphenation unwieldy, and can’t come up with any blending that doesn’t sound dopey, so we’re keeping our current names.
The question is what to do with the kids. We’re thinking of having two, so I suggested that we give the first one one of our names as a middle name and another as a last name, then do the same thing with names reversed for the second. Fiancee doesn’t like this idea, as she wants the kids to have the same last name. I don’t think it’s that big of deal, I mean, it’s not like they won’t know they’re family. Thoughts?
FYI in Pennsylvania, there’s also no fee for the name change itself. For us it was $40.00 for the marriage license (half of which, by the way, goes to the state Domestic Violence prevention fund–y’all might like that! Makes you feel good about getting the license.
).
My sister and I both couldn’t wait to get rid of our last name, (let’s call it “Thatlastname”) mostly due to “issues” with my dad’s side of the family. My grandmother is, for lack of a better word, a jerk, and my dad has many of her traits as well. My mom even refuses to let my niece call her Grandma Thatlastname, because that’s my grandmother’s title and my mom can’t stand her MIL.
So….why did I wait for a patriarchal reason to change my name, and not change it anyway without a husband?? I don’t really have a good “nonpatriarchal” excuse unfortunately. If I’d stayed single, I might have changed it anyway eventually–I wouldn’t want to still be Thatlastname at 40, 50, 80, 90.
I went from having a strangely spelled first name and normal last name to a strangely spelled first and last name when I got married. Sigh. At least the pain of having to spell out both all the time is slightly mitigated by being able to truthfully answer “there’s no one here by that name” when telemarketers call and botch the whole thing.
I heard something interesting from a friend - her employer had hired a handwriting analyst for one of those “team building” weekend crap retreats. Handwriting analysis is mostly bunk, but she said there was one part that was kind of neat; he pegged one woman correctly as having marital problems, and he said that when marriages were in trouble women tend to write their last names in a much sloppier, angrier, almost different handwriting (if she had taken the husband’s last name). I could see that.
What I do hate with a passion is getting cards that are addressed to both of us, with my last name changed to his.
What I hate is getting cards with my FIRST name changed to his!!! Instead of Ms. Kate Bisyllabicbalkanname things were arriving for Mrs. Zog Bisyllabicbalkanname.
Fuck that.
Then I defended my dissertation. Dearest Zog, knowing how much I HATE THIS, took it upon himself to notify various of his relations that we were now to be referred to as Dr. Kate and Mr. Zog. He then attached the official Emily Post and Miss Manners articles describing the proper etiquette for address when one spouse outranks you.
That’s my excuse as well. I was 21 when I got married and it honestly never occurred to me not to take his name, I just added it right to the end of mine, so my old last name is now legally another middle name. It’s just what you did when you got married. We never even really discussed it, except that I asked him which name he preferred I take, his first or a shortened form of his last (he’s Sri Lankan and they have a different naming convention than we do–still patriarchal, but in a different way). He asked once if I was sure that’s what I wanted to do and I still didn’t even consider not doing it.
We’ve discussed it since and he offered to take my name when he got his citizenship or switch to the shortened form of his own that I had taken (they make it easy to change surnames at that point), but he ended up going with the shortened version of his name. More to please his mom than anything else, I think.
That is about the cutest thing ever. Makes me want to just go kiss Zog (with your permission, of course.)
I got lectured once by a someone from work when I was first married(I was a grad student at the time, he also works in the same department as computer/tech staff, and she was an older lady custodian, very much like a surrogate mother to him) because I sent her Christmas cards with my name first. Apparently it’s bad manners to put the wife’s name first. I replied that when he did the cards, then his name could come first, but since he didn’t even think of it and I did all the work, I’d sign them however I wanted and she could just be grateful it had his name on it at all. I’ve also gotten the same lecture (and given the same reply) from some of my older relatives.
My wife did not take my last name (we both have boring British names; hers is Scottish, mine is English). It puzzles telemarketers occasionally, but no one else cares.
Once when someone called and asked for Mr. Wife’s Last Name, I held the phone away and said, “sweetie, I think it’s someone calling for your husband…” which caused the telemarketer to hang up in confusion
Some people have a real problem with Mr. Buday.
I just don’t understand these people (I mean the people at the link. Mr. Buday makes perfect sense.) I really, really, really don’t.
My completely self-centered reason for not changing my name when I married was that the Bar Association was obnoxious and I didn’t want to go to the trouble. Some friends and I came up with a solution for other couples want the same last name: both use the name that’s easier to spell. Thus, Garcia wins over Schickledauber or Cvojka. (That second one is Czech, and is pronouned Quake - Ah. Just like it’s spelled.)
I wanted to go with my name for the kids, because it’s unusual (my ex was “Carroll,” which isn’t.) Not a lot of Feckes out there, wanted to keep the line going. Had my last name been “Smith,” I think I would’ve been less attached to it.
All that said, I didn’t push my ex to change her name when we married; she hyphenated and I took her last name as a second middle name. In Minnesota, it’s county-by-county as to whether they let men change their name; Ramsey County does.
Of course, we divorced in Dakota County; there they don’t let you automatically change your name if you’re a man, so I have been stuck with middle name #2 unless I want to pay for a name change, while my ex simply un-hyphenated.
Ultimately, the solution would be pretty simple if people wanted to embrace it–matrilineal names for girls, patrilineal names for boys–and someday we may even get there.
Oh, and one final note, someone upthread noted that she didn’t want her abusive father’s name. I have a good friend — a guy — who legally changed his surname to his mother’s maiden name. His father was abusive to his mother and ran off when he was about three. He only saw the man two or three times in his life. Joe said his father didn’t deserve the honor, his mother and her parents did. Now he’s got his own law firm, with MOM’s last name in it.
I put my husband’s name first to his relatives (especially the younger ones who think Oh yeah, Uncle Jim) and my name first to mine. I’ve never paid any attention to how he does it.
Y’all are going to hate me for saying this…
…but there is a good reason for the INS to look more closely at a marriage where the American woman has not changed her last name.
After five years of marriage, the spouse is eligible to become a citizen. If the marriage dissolves after that, he maintains his citizenship status. The INS is in the unenviable position of ferreting out which couples are legitimately marrying and which ones have sham weddings.
For what it’s worth, NOT changing a last name - where it will be easier for the woman to revert back to her previous social/professional existance upon divorce after grant of citizenship - is a fairly legitimate basis for questioning. Face it - few people would bother to go through with the name change as well, knowing that it’ll change back in a few years. The group of people who don’t change their names includes the sham marriage people as well as the feminists and women who hate their husband’s last name.
That all said, there will be an increase in the number of women who refuse to change their names upon marriage. Women make up some 55% of college graduates, roughly half of grad school graduates, and are marrying after having established themselves professionally. As a professional woman, I know the power of my name and would be set back if I were no longer so identified.
I’ll also plead a lack of feminist awareness when I got married at 20, it didn’t even occur to me not to take his name. I take that back, it did and I said “well, that’s stupid, only feminists do that and I’m not a feminist”. Looking back from a feminist perspective, yeah it’s totally patriarchal and I’ll admit, I probably still would’ve changed it, because frankly my last name was never that important to me and I never considered it a big deal. I don’t deny that it’s a patriarchy influenced thing though, I know it is. That’s why it wasn’t a big deal to me at all and my husband probably wouldn’t have even considered it.0 With the feminist awareness I have now, I might have at least entertained other ideas though. I’ve actually thought of going back to my maiden name a couple times, but I’ve actually gotten quite attached to my current last name, to the point where I probably wouldn’t drop it, even if we were to get divorced.
I promise this is the last I’ve got to say on this. I’m rather grateful that my parents didn’t hyphenate. My mother’s maiden name is Dickson and my father’s name is Cox. Unless I wanted to be a porn star, the name “Dickson - Cox” would have been utter hell.
Y’all are going to hate me for saying this…
…but there is a good reason for the INS to look more closely at a marriage where the American woman has not changed her last name.
Then it is as equally a good reason to look more closely at a relationship where the man doesn’t change his name,either.
Sorry, it is still patriarchy. Either apply an even standard or stop asking people how often their housemates had sex and if they were loud when they did!
Ultimately, the solution would be pretty simple if people wanted to embrace it–matrilineal names for girls, patrilineal names for boys–and someday we may even get there.
And Mary and Heather will do what if it’s a boy?
so then, what with the kids? that’s where it gets tricky.
Not really, although I guess you’d both have to agree. My position would probably be to pick whichever one was easier without being overly common… for example, my name isn’t that difficult, but is consistently mispronounced and/or mistaken for a more common one, but I’d battle for giving it to kids over a dad’s Jones or Davis or Richards (all of which I’ve dated in the past). But I wouldn’t care as much if he had a less-common name that’s easier to spell/pronounce, because the kids would probably end up being pissed if they got mine in that case. Or name them Jingleheimer-Schmidt and piss everyone off.
Apparently it’s bad manners to put the wife’s name first.
When sending stuff to couples, I usually put the name of whichever one I’ve known longest first, and I don’t do Mrs. Hisfullname unless the lady in question is very elderly. In fact, I don’t even do it for my own grandmother, although I don’t think she cares, since Granddad’s been dead over a decade anyway.
Pretty much everything I’d argue on this topic has already been said, but I did want to offer my stock reply when asked (increasingly rarely) about my disinclination to change my name… I just say “I don’t do ritual sacrifices” and smile.
Ms Kate - that is the cutest story! And I guess I should be grateful that my husband’s relatives do not insist on going all the way and calling me Mrs. HisFirstName HisLastName. I think I would have a coronary upon receit of thus addressed card.
And, yeah, the INS process is incredibly sexist. I know of one case where the husband was asked what color underwear his wife wore to the interview. Which would be a pretty smart (and typically sneaky and invasive of INS) question, if only it was asked of both partners. Everything I’ve heard about this process - admittedly, hearsay - indicates that when a male citizen marries a foreign national woman, the questions are much more invasive and are more likely to be about the couple’s sex life than in cases of a female citizen marrying a foreign national male. I guess the assumption is that any female foreign national is a mail-order bride and that the only reason to marry a foreign woman is for sex. Hmph.
Actually, when I was in college, it went the other way around. Any male foreigner was obviously trading in a student visa for a spousal green card, while it was far more “normal” for a female foreigner to marry a red blooded all amurkin male.
Contextural, perhaps?
Oh, and I do find myself wondering why so many women claim that their names just didn’t mean that much to them… there’s probably a dissertation to be written on just that topic. I’d guess that most men don’t spend time pondering the deeper meaning of their surnames, either, until it’s time to inflict it on a wife by claiming a greater attachment.
My better half and I got married without either of us changing names. Both of us were already published, but even if we hadn’t been, we wouldn’t have — they’d worked for us up to that point. When we had kids, they got their own surname that was half of mine plus half of his (and, from the last Social Security name search I did, quite possibly they’re the only people in the US with their surname). There was no problem at all specifying their surname as we designed it on their birth certificates.
On a somewhat related note, some years back I became aware that the people keeping stats on “out of wedlock” kids in California were counting all the kids whose mothers and fathers had different surnames listed on the birth certificate as unmarried. Which, in a lot of cases, not so much.
>Ultimately, the solution would be pretty simple if people wanted to embrace
> it–matrilineal names for girls, patrilineal names for boys–and someday we
>may even get there.
And Mary and Heather will do what if it’s a boy?
Name it after a saint or deity or a fictional character.
Carrot Zeus Rahl has two mommies!
And Mary and Heather will do what if it’s a boy?
Flip a coin. Or do what friends of my ex did and simply call dibs on which kid got whose last name. They had two girls, one with each last name. No system’s perfect.
Ms Kate - I think it’s probably because of all the mail-order services out there. Of course it’s “normal” for an American male to want to marry a submissive foreign woman who knows what true family values are like (blech! I hate saying this even sarcastically) and, naturally, the red-blooded American male is so desirable that any foreign woman would want one. But we must protect the poor, beleagured American male from the evil foreign women who want to marry him for the green card! I think it also depends on what the country of origin is, but I’ve also heard stories about people from EU and Australia going through hell with INS. It’s what INS does, really.
Funnily enough, my husband is an American. I was a resident alien and a citizen long before I even met him. In the NYC area, no one bats an eyelash - everyone is an immigrant. After we moved to a different part of the country, we began to notice that many people try to ask questions that are subtly aimed at figuring out whether I was a citizen before I met him.
INS questioning is crap, the only person likely to know the colour and condition of underwear is the poor sucker who regularly draws the laundry chore. My husband could take it off me with his teeth and not remember what it looked like!
I never considered for a moment changing my name. Professionally it would be insanity, I’ve few enough publications without scattering them under two different surnames! My reason for my kids having my husband’s surname is simple, I love him and I wanted people to know that he was their father, I’m pretty proud of that moment of darwinian selection. Mind you, if the worm ever turns I might re-consider that decision.
Just before the wedding, my first husband had a complete meltdown when it became apparent to him that I wasn’t planning to change my last name. I gave him loads of reasons why I didn’t want to do it, but he said, “If you don’t change your name, there’s not going to be a wedding.” I acquiesced, which was dumb on multiple levels because resentment from the name-thing led to so many passive aggressive behaviors on my part. It’s no wonder we didn’t last.
Before I married my second (and last) husband, we talked about the name thing. He knew my story from before and he offered to either take my name or for us to combine our names into a new one (it was actually unique and not difficult to pronounce). This time, the decision was mine. I decided that I *liked* his name and loved him enough that I would give him what was most precious to me. That probably sounds sappy to a lot of people, but his behavior told me he realized why the name-thing was such an issue for women.
For a woman, all she has to do is indicate it on her marriage license.
That’s true, but changing your name back, if you forget to have it fixed at the time of the divorce, will cost you $300-$600 just like changing names does for a man.
Oh, and one final note, someone upthread noted that she didn’t want her abusive father’s name. I have a good friend — a guy — who legally changed his surname to his mother’s maiden name. His father was abusive to his mother and ran off when he was about three. He only saw the man two or three times in his life. Joe said his father didn’t deserve the honor, his mother and her parents did. Now he’s got his own law firm, with MOM’s last name in it.
That’s cool, Karen. Thanks.
I was in Japan when we went through all of this at our office trying to put together databases of women in science and technology…the Japanese gov’t is incredibly snippy about all of this and wanting to push women to change their names. Trying to keep track of publication records in databases gets to be a real nightmare….we threw up our hands and ended up just cross-referencing everything we could find.
I also remember hearing about one couple, both professors, for whom the headache of “a single name” got to be so much that they finally got divorced….but are still living together. (We have “fake marriages” in this country; in Japan they have “fake divorces.”)
My boyfriend seemed bothered when I said that if I ever married, I wouldn’t change my name (although he doesn’t want to get married so why he cares at all is a mystery to me). I said, “what’s the big deal if I don’t change my name? I like my name. It’s my name, and always has been. I don’t want to change it.” He said, “but, but… it’s a symbol of commitment!!” I said, “isn’t marriage commitment enough?” That seemed to shut him up
honestly, if and when I do actually get around to marrying (thank the heavenly host that’s a ways off. I have grad school to pay for) they better have cleaned up the name mechanics for combinations or hyphens.
because if I have to actually spend upwards of 300 bucks on a name change, I’m gonna be a collosal dick about it and pick a name that will just embarrass everybody. like “The Immortal Emperor” or “Bond Jamesbond”
that’s the full name. printed on every single one of my checks, my drivers liscense, and god knows what else. you gonna card “Bond Jamesbond” when he’s buying a drink? gonna write The Immortal Emperor a speeding ticket? refuse the check of “Overlord Drakkhan?”
fuck you guys, I got a sick sense of humor.
I note that North Dakota came up as a state which allows such name changes for men on marriage licenses. I’m not surprised; North Dakota does a few things that are rather progressive, as far as legal processes are concerned (among them, no voter registration; just show up with proof of residence!).
I also know a couple who did, in fact, take the wife’s name as the family name when they got married. He was a convert to Judaism, and thought that “Goldie” would be a better name for a Jewish family than “Christiansen.”
I can’t imagine why.
said, “but, but… it’s a symbol of commitment!!� I said, “isn’t marriage commitment enough?� That seemed to shut him up
Excellent point. And besides, what would his public, symbolic statement of commitment have been?
In my first marriage, we decided to both change our names to one we both picked. That just seemed fairer than for her to change her name to mine. We chose my mother’s maiden name, Lieberknecht, because it sounded cool (although at 12 letters long, it was somewhat of a mistake, another story) We were in CA and it was gonna be a big hassle to change it legally. And we did get weird looks and a lecture when we tried to get a court to do it.
So we read up in law books about changing it by simple usage. We both simply started using the new name. Once the DMV accepted the new names, everybody else was easy to deal with. It was a little tricky with our passports but we finally figured that out too. There was no cost at all.
Yay! I just got married in one of the states that allows equal name changing! (Iowa)
Not that we did. I like my name. He likes his. They’re ridiculously evenly matched in terms of ethnicity/commonness/etc.–if we had hyphenated we would have sounded like characters in a Jane Austen novel. We both have enough of an established professional identity to argue for keeping our names as they are.
We didn’t actually talk about it until we were filling out the form for the marriage license (which has two lines, one for current name, one for name after marriage. As far as I could tell, we could’ve chosen to change our entire names at that point). He said, “I assume you’re not changing your name?” and I said “We haven’t talked about this before? Of course not. You can take my name if you want.” and he said “No thanks.” and that was that.
I’m really tired of being asked if I changed my name. I like to respond by looking at people like they’re crazy for even asking.
The question is what to do with the kids.
Step One on what to do with the kids: let go of the idea that Dad has an absolute male-privilege right to ‘continue the line’ by passing on his name.
That set aside, we decided that our kids would have the same-sex parent’s last name and the other parent’s as a middle name. So a daughter is Girl Dadslastname Momslastname, and a son is Boy Momslastname Dadslastname.
We have two daughters with my last name and a son with his. None of them think it odd, or think that their names are different. After all, they all HAVE the same names; it’s just that the order of the names is different for boys than for girls. They all have each parents’ names as part of theirs. Granted, I live in California, but I’ve never seen anyone bat an eye; there are enough blended families running around that a mixed bag of names is nothing special.
My mother married in the early 60s at 18 years old. She changed her name to “MiddleName MaidenName HubbysMcLastName.” Her father was an alcoholic jerk (and that’s about all I know about him - musta been a really swell fella).
My partner and I decided to change both of our last names to a different one. We took our time coming up with something we really liked. We experimented with misc. combos of ours, and then decided that what we liked best was something completely different. We chose the last name of a Vermont revolutionary-war era heroine after whom our VT civil union’s bed & breakfast was named. Sentimental to the last!
I dropped my original birth middle name in favor of my birth last name, so I’m now “Bonnie McLargestScottishClan VTHeroine.” My partner did not keep her birth last name - her family (except for her uber-cool artist-painter grandma) is not worth remembering by name.
Everyone seems to have accepted this, and when we told our co-workers and friends, we got accolades and thumbs-ups for originality.
Did cost some bucks for each of us, though, here in Nevada.
Related to the addressing of cards with the man’s name first…When I was in high school I was my dad’s assistant (real estate broker) and was responsible for drafting letters to clients. Most were addressed to a couple, and while they had each person’s first name, the man’s name was always first. So since I was editing anyway, I made it so they were in alphabetical order by first name instead. : )
I’m not changing my name for marriage, but would be willing to take a husband/wife’s last name as a second middle name, if they did the same with mine.
Not to toot Minnesota’s horn or anything, but in MN both parties may change their name to anything else, provided it is decided at the time of application for certificate.
I used to work for the DMV and saw about 2 men changing their names after marriage, but I only worked there a year and this was 10 years ago.
No extra fees for either party.
Step One on what to do with the kids: let go of the idea that Dad has an absolute male-privilege right to ‘continue the line’ by passing on his name.
Well, sod that. My father walked out whern I was five.
I’m not changing my name, but I sure as hell wouldn’t care about passing it on. Let the kids be named after my wife’s family, if we like them, or alternate between my wife’s surname and my mother’s maiden surname.
After my girlfriend and I had been dating a while, I brought up the idea of a non conventional name change. She was not in favor of it though, saying it would just upset her(very traditional Viet) family, and she felt she was more ‘comfortable’ doing it that way. I didn’t think it was worth arguing about anymore, since that was her wish and I didn’t see why I should respect it. Is this ok, or should I continue to try and convince her?
So if I give my kids my husband’s last name because it would have thrilled my Irish-German grandmother to have Irish-surnamed great-grandkids instead of Italian-surnamed, is that feminist or anti-feminist?
(This was the grandmother who got very angry with me one day for describing the IRA as terrorists. Only possible response was, “Yeah, okay, grandma, whatever.”)
My mom often delegates me to addressing the Christmas-card envelopes, and inevitably complains afterwards that I address them to “(Him) and (Her) Lastname” or “(Her) and (Him) Lastname,” rather than “Mr. & Mrs. (Him) (Lastname).
My mother changed her name but moved her maiden name to her middle name, and I inherited it as my middle name as well. I’m honestly not sure what I’d do if I get married, there being such unanswered questions as whether the person I’ll marry will be male or female, and how interesting a name they will have. My current last name is quite common and vaguely boring; my mother’s maiden name is a short and misspelled Norwegian one and unpleasantly reminiscent of her father. I’m planning on changing my first name, since I do not like the one I was given, and perhaps might as well change the last name while I’m at it, with or without a marriage or civil union or at least partnership. I’d be tempted if they had a name I was fond of, and even more tempted if said partner was female—taking another woman’s name is a potshot at the system rather than an act of deference toward it.
I’m quite fond of the name Jones, personally . . . although that probably has just about everything to do with a somewhat disturbing crush I’ve developed this past summer movie season. Probably a good thing that people have different tastes . . . otherwise we’d all be trying to have the same type of last name, and that kind of defeats the purpose thereof.
Ugh. Thank you thank you THANK you. My mother didn’t take my father’s last name, and I have NEVER had any sort of problems growing up. People saying “think of the children!!!!1″ make me see red, because it feels to me like they haven’t asked anyone with any experience in the matter, like they’re just parroting convention.
Then again, I’m always surprised when people talk about how men never really do the job of raising their children, as my father’s always been my primary caretaker while my mother worked long shifts. So I could be biased.
My mother had a particularly terrible last name, and we used to joke that getting my dad’s last name was one of the reasons she married him.
(Seriously though - her last name was “Fruchter” (what? I hardly even know her!). My dad’s last name is “Dow”).
The flip side was, of course, that she absolutely forbid me from changing my name if I were ever to get married, because she had worked so damned hard to get me a “nice” last name.
My mum kept her name when she married, but dad passed his name on to all five kids. Back in the early 80’s in Australia, that was a total nightmare- she had to bring her marriage certificate to pick us up from preschool, discharge us from hospital, make legal decisions on our behalf- bleah. I got very angry very early about all the people who assumed that she wasn’t really my mother, because I didn’t have her name. By age 7 I had a good spiel to rattle off at any teacher or bureucrat who dared to address a letter to my parents as “Mr & Mrs Mylastname”- I would shake my fist and demand “That’s MS Mymumsname and MR Mylastname”. These days it’s DR Mymumsname- my mum is quite awesome that way.
Some lesbian friends of mine recently had a child, and they gave her her own name- found a name that they thought symbolised everything they wanted for her life and put their own last names as middle names. An elegant solution, I thought.
I’m thinking that if I meet my life partner & we decide to share a name (which I would like to do), I’m going to suggest chopping up all the syllables of all our names (and our mum’s names) onto bits of paper, drinking a few bottles of wine and rearranging and playing with the syllables till we have something we both like.
A friend of mine considered changing her last name when she got married. It’s frequently mispronounced and mis-spelled but her husband-to-be was against it since it’s a cool greek name.
Now that they are contemplating kids, we’ve all been discussing options. I brought up the boy-with-dads-name and girl-with-moms-name thing but the husband didn’t particularly like that idea. Apparently, he just doesn’t like his name that much.
The final decision was that the decision would be based on what the name they choose goes with best.
I have some nephews that have very anglo first and middle names with a definitely spanish last name. It makes saying their names fun.
I considered changing my last name to my birth last name for a long time. The stepfather I got it from is not my father no matter what it says on my birth certificate and he was abusive. But when it finally came down to it two things popped up: too much hassle unless I was getting married and….it had become my name. I’ve had it for as long as I can remember. If I’d had a chance when I was younger, I could have changed it in a heartbeat but when I got older I realized that whatever emotional baggage I had toward the name was gone.
I don’t think I’d change my name to my spouse’s if I ever get married (maybe if it was a really cool name). I’m definitely not planning on the hyphen route. I like the idea of picking a whole new name (whether it’s a name merge or not).
The whole deal with women changing their last name upon marriage is completely alien to me. I didn’t know about it until four years ago when I moved to the US. In my culture (Latin America), no one changes last names when they get married. Everyone has two surnames, one from the father and one from the mother, and no one is ever confused by this. Since I moved here, I’ve had all sorts of problems with that. I had to insert a hyphen between my surnames just so that people wouldn’t think that my first surname was a middle name. Even so, I still get junk mail addressed to “Emily A. SecondSurname”, where “A” stands for the first letter of my first surname — as if it was a middle name, which it is SO not. Sometimes I even get mail addressed to “Mrs SecondSurname”, which also annoys the hell out of me. And I am not changing my name when I get married. Both me and my boyfriend are scientists-in-training, and will have several published articles before we ever get married. Changing my surnames for his makes no sense to me from both a cultural standpoint and from a professional angle. I hope that when we get mail addressed to both of us, it will be to “Dr. Me and Dr. Him”, or viceversa, and not “Mr and Mrs HisLastName”. Ugh, just the thought of it makes my skin crawl. And if I ever get phonecalls asking for “Mrs HisLastName”, I’ll just say that my mother-in-law doesn’t live with us. “What about the kids?” Well, if we ever have kids, *then* we can think about what to do — but I am leaning towards doing the Latin American thing and giving my hypothetical offspring two surnames, one from each parent. My boyfriend understands all of this, and has said that he wouldn’t ever think about asking me to renounce my culture by adopting a practice that is so bizarre in my eyes. He knows that I wouldn’t love him any less for not taking his last name, and that our commitment is there regardless of what our surnames are. We’ll just as always still be “Emily and John”.
It seems like I make this same comment (or something along these lines) whenever a “last name issues” blog post appears anywhere in the blogs I read. It’s just such a pet peeve of mine, mainly because of the issues I’ve experienced with my own two surnames , which I will keep for the rest of my life regardless of what the future holds.
(Bloody hell, the rape apologist troll PiaToR’s on this thread, too.)
I’m amazed how expensive and bureaucratic people say it is in the US to change your name. In the UK, it’s not simple - banks, employers, and of course the Inland Revenue all have to be told, and there will be queries about “and your previous name?” - but it’s as cheap as an advert in the newspaper, and requires no significant contact with government agencies to do it. (If you’re a freelancer and change your name, I’m told it saves a lot of hassle to formally change it by deed poll and send the document to the tax people to prove you’re not name-changing with intent to defraud them, but if you’re just paying all your tax through your employer, that’s not an issue…)
Changing your name on marriage, especially if you’re female, is a degree simpler than changing your name by any other method in the UK (no tradition has arisen yet of changing your name on civil partnership, and probably never will, since there’s no patriarchal benefit to it) but mainly because the Inland Revenue folks require no further evidence than a marriage certificate to assume that a woman didn’t do it with intent to defraud them.
I’m really startled to find out it’s this complex and expensive in the US. Why didn’t the legal tradition that anyone can use any name they please so long as they do so without intent to defraud travel across the Atlantic?
I didn’t change my name in order to get married. The marriage was not a patriarchal gesture of conformity but rather a measure to facilitate the immigration of my SO. Nonetheless, it was very difficult to find the booking which my family had made under our names, upon arriving in a distant town distinctly jetlagged. After many attempts to find out names on the computer, the hotel clerk finally found the booking under Mr and Mrs [husband’s name]. I considered this little fact to be a warning that the event I had come to attend was to involve an unsympathetic ideological staging of patriarchal values. This turned out to be the case.
by the time my husband and I got married we had been living together for 16 years. We thought the idea of changing our names (his to mine or vice versa) was pretty funny. Instead we thought we’d both change our names — only fair (we should be equally inconvenienced) and to signify a new union. Still we just couldn’t take it seriously — “we’ll change our last name to Snark! Bob and Donna Snark!” This name, however, conjured up images of us running a corner store or gas station in some desolate corner of North Dakota and we didn’t feel like moving.
I think it’s rather random whether a person considers their name to be themselves or just a label. You won’t find Samantha Vimes on my official paperwork anywhere, but I will answer to that name in real life as well as on the net, and would be kind of upset to have *that* identity watered down by someone else using it online. But I disliked by first and last name from when I was a child and couldn’t pronounce it clearly enough to please many adults.
My father’s (changed in court rather than born with) last name was shorter than my husband’s (adopted) last name, so many people suggested we have him change his name to mine, and me fiance was willing. I liked his last name, though, because although it was long I considered it more melodious than my aspirate heavy birth name. Hell, with a maidenname of He— He— I had more than once forgotten whether I was signing my first or last name mid-marking, a mistake I have never made with my changed name.
I’d have used my middle name growing up but my older brother was using his middle name, and he already had called me a copycat for nearly everything I did. A simple way of getting out of He— He— was a relief for me, and not one that had been on my mind when I first hated my name, because I spent my childhood refusing to consider that I would one day be married.
I was in a rebellious stage around the time I got married, so part of the reason I changed my name was to piss off my family. Juvenile, I know. I may change it back at some point, but I’m rather enjoying my relative anonymity.
…but I am leaning towards doing the Latin American thing and giving my hypothetical offspring two surnames, one from each parent.
Emily,
How would you determine which of your 2 surnames to use? Is there a convention or is it a random choice?
I’m a big fan of the name fusion thing. There’s two philosophers at MIT, Stephen Yablo and Sally Haslanger, who fused their names and are now the “Yablangers�. It’s hard to say without smiling.
That’s so awesome. I want my name to be Yablanger.
Some friends and I came up with a solution for other couples want the same last name: both use the name that’s easier to spell.
What if Ms. Smith marries Mr. Jones? Or Ms. Schumacher marries Mr. Glockenspiel (not a real last name, I know)?
I had to insert a hyphen between my surnames just so that people wouldn’t think that my first surname was a middle name.
Me too! I was born in Puerto Rico and when we moved to the states for a couple years I was going by my dad’s name, but it sounded weird to me and I lived with my mom (I’d drop the dad’s last name entirley, since we haven’t spoken in like 6 years, but then I would have a named uncomfortably similar to a singer’s. Think Christine Aguilera). Also, I have grown kind of fond of my unwieldy, ethnically-nonsensical (despite being Puerto Rican, my last name somehow wound up Basque-English) name. That said:
It’s not his last name. It’s his father’s EXACTLY like yours is your father’s.
If I don’t like inheriting my father’s name, and I don’t, I don’t know why I’m supposed to be any happier at inheriting somebody else’s father’s name. A man’s name is not his if yours is not yours.
But don’t associate your husband’s name with your husband’s father, you associate it with him. Whereas even if you’ve had your own name all your life, you do definitely associate your own name with your father’s name (assuming that’s how you came by it). Although my name is definitely mine, I still do think of the father’s part of it as my father’s name, whereas I don’t think of my friends’ names, of either sex, as their parents’ last names because they’re the ones I associate the names with. Plus, the whole thing with wanting to change your name because your father is an asshole isn’t about not wanting a man’s name, it’s about not wanting to be named after that one man.
If I got married I’d almost definitely keep my name. Unless my husband-to-be were willing to hyphenate with me (in which case I’d be HusbandsLastName-MyMomsLastName) or consider a name merge or other form of change. But if not that’d be cool too. I don’t want kids so hopefully that’ll never be an issue, but I wouldn’t really care too much if they all had his name because… *shrug* Not a big deal to me. (though I can see why it would be).
I often wondered it this would be an issue in gay marriage or how it would be dealt with. I kind of like the name combining thing; my only problem is one of geneological convenience.
Oeno, since a man who insists that his wife change her last name respects his wife less than a man who doesn’t insist that, wouldn’t a marriage where the wife keeps her last name seem more stable? After all, the name change indicates the man is more likely to be domineering and therefore run his wife off.
My mother gave me her surname (she kept her name) for my middle name, so it’s Tlönista HerName HisName. Then my mother’s sister did the same thing for her kids.
The Latin American custom sounds pretty reasonable. I also wonder how the children are named.
Ah, in line for our marriage license at the clerk’s office with Mr. Orange, we both looked at each other and realized that we had never discussed the name-change situation. So he looked at me with complete and absolute honesty and said “It would be okay if you wanted to change both our names to something new, like Mr. and Mrs. Batman.”
It made me laugh so hard I almost fell out of line. We tried saying different combinations out loud, and our names sounded really good together, both short and from similar root structures. I just added his name to mine, no hyphen, just a space; I always wanted three names like an Upper-Class Twit of the Year.
My finances, work, and medical records, however, remain in my name (which is, legally, still my name.) I like having a flexible name, and many aliases; but I don’t pretend that I did anything other than accept a patriarchal construction. I did, and do, and I know it’s not for everyone; I just chose my battles elsewhere.
one of the first women to make headway by keeping her maiden name was Doris Fleischman, who married public relations pioneer/guru Edward Bernays. Sadly, I’ve come to find out, this was more a publicity stunt disguised as feminism cooked up by Bernays than a statement wholeheartedly made by either Fleischman or Bernays …
Hyphenation is stupid with some names.
My husband offered, quite seriously, to take my name. But we have 8 million MyLastNames in my family, and not as many in his.
Combining our names didn’t work–really came out badly however you did it.
I liked his name better than mine. As a bookseller, I have also observed that more people browse the authors at the beginning of the alphabet where he is, than at the end, where I was. I want to be a published author, and I want people to find my books.
So I took his name for my own. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t as ass kissing move, but hey, I don’t care if you think it was. I have already changed my first name, and maybe I’m weird that way, but really kind of enjoy that I have a completely different first and last name than the one I used as a child. And my old last name was my dad’s, anyway, and he was sexist, racist, and fundie, while the fiance was not.
Maybe we should have both taken a completely different name that worked for us, but that involved lawyers and court fees, and we were broke.
Names are complex things. Personally I think we should all change our names at adolescence, marriage, and menopause.
It seems to me that marriage is mostly a patriarchal institution anyway– personally, can’t see myself doing it unless I was going to be a housewife and wanted to be able to collect alimony in the event of divorce — so the name change issue seems pretty moot.
And as a sidenote: have always hated my last name and mostly drop it and use my middle one, a la Fiona Apple.
My finances, work, and medical records, however, remain in my name (which is, legally, still my name.) I like having a flexible name, and many aliases; but I don’t pretend that I did anything other than accept a patriarchal construction.
Yep. Though, interestingly, I have to endorse checks being deposited to our joint account with my husband’s last name. Not sure why the bank set it up that way, especially since my personal account still has my legal last name on it.
And I always know when I can hang up on a telemarketer, because they ask for “Mrs. McGillicuddy.”
I used to work in the records department of a Colorado public university. An ongoing part of the job was processing the endless name changes for (mostly) women who had gotten married. And then divorced. And then married again. Not so much for current students, although we had a few, but for the alumni.
When a name change request would come in, we would log it in the computer (that took about two seconds). But then we would go and pull the paper file, change the label, and re-file it alphabetically with the new name. Of course, as idle state bureaucrats, we spent a fair amount of time gossiping and joking about the changes in question, as well as cursing people who went from “Adams” to “Zykowski”, necessitating us to walk all the way to the other end of the filing racks. What was really scary was the not-so-rare cases where people would have three, four, five, six name changes. From “Jones” to “Smith” and then back to “Jones” and then to “Franklin” and then back to “Jones” and then to “Cohen” and so on. We joked about getting on the phone and giving these folks a call - “ma’am, you’re welcome to get married again, but maybe this time you could wait a few years before you change it for the records…just to make sure it’s going to stick, you know?”
There were men doing the same thing, of course, but we didn’t usually see them because they didn’t change their name every time they got married. My own thinking on this has changed; you should just keep the name you were born with, and give children the father’s name (on the basis of compatibility with existing naming traditions).
I changed my name when I married because it made that guy happy.
Then I divorced, but kept it because I was afraid my preteen kids might feel rejected, and he’d already done quite enough of that.
Now that the last one is graduating, I have been mulling over what I want for a last name (funny, my last child — a boy — is also considering a name change, so maybe I shouldn’t have worried).
Well, on the gay marriage issue, I am contemplating proposing to my long-time SO, and while we haven’t discussed the last name issue, I’m fine with whatever he wants to do, although I’d rather not change my last name (because of financial/professional continuity reasons, not because of any objection to his last name). If he wants to take my last name (which I doubt), he is welcome to do so; if he wants to keep his current last name, likewise. I’ not sure where this falls in the “effect of the patriarchy on last names following marriage,” but it’s a data point.
For my part, I’d rule out hyphenating, but only for aesthetic reasons, and because I’m too lazy to use a signature that’s longer than the one I already have.
Almost everyone asked me “what about your children?” when I did not take my husband’s name. As if these mysterious children that may never exist were higher on the priority list than me. If we do have A child, she or he would have both names. Simple.
My mother-in-law addresses cards to Mr. and Mrs. His Name. Ick. When my husband pointed out the “mistake”, she said, “so you’re not legally married?” Hmmmmmm. I give her the benefit of the doubt because she lives in rural NC.
Isabel: Whereas even if you’ve had your own name all your life, you do definitely associate your own name with your father’s name (assuming that’s how you came by it).
Which is why you hear so many men saying “It’s not my name - it’s my father’s, so I don’t care if I change it to my wife’s.”
Tlonista- Is that your actual first name? I’m just wondering if your parents took it from Borges?
I didn’t change my name when I got married at 19, for explicitly feminist reasons. During the engagement, my fiancee was initially a tad hurt when I announced I was keeping my name, but after I explained why, he completely understood and was like, “Come to think of it, it is really stupid and patriarchal” and now he’s my biggest defender.
Over Christmas, we visited my husband’s family in West Virginia, and his father was just completely aghast that I had kept my name. He kept questioning whether we were actually married. He was like, “What’s the matter with our last name? Don’t you like it? Why won’t you take it?” I was like, “Um…I don’t really have an opinion on your last name. I already HAVE a last name.” And he gave my husband this look, like, “Why aren’t you controlling your woman?!”
We got a wedding card and check from a friend of my mom’s the other day, and while the card was addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Landes” like several others (groan), the check was also paid to the order of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Landes. I went to the bank and endorsed it with my name and was about to have it deposited in my (separate! gasp) bank account when the teller informed my husband that the check couldn’t go through unless he co-endorsed it.
I felt like I was in a time warp. I love having my identity reduced to a fricking TITLE. “Hi, I’m Missus, and this is my husband, Joe Landes!” I am the title, and he is the person. Please. Kiss my ass, patriarchy.
I was married in 1986 (and divorced a few years later, but that’s a whole nother story). I somehow just could not bring myself to change my name. My now ex was a little pissed off and did the whole “But we need to be the SAME” thing. I told him if it bothered him that much for us to have different last names, he could change his, especially since his had belonged to one in a string of stepfathers to begin with. He looked at me astonished, and said “Why would I want to do THAT?!?” To which I responded “Precisely” and that was the end of that.
Wind speeds approaching Category 3…
I took my husband’s last name when I married him. I’m sorry that offends some of you so much. Oh wait — no, I’m not. It was my choice and I wanted to do it, for reasons that were almost entirely aesthetic. Don’t you dare accuse me of propping up patriarchy by doing something I wanted to do. The opinions of strangers didn’t factor into my decision, and they still don’t.
I guess I can’t get too fired up about men’s difficulties here because I live in Georgia, a state that is only backwards in some ways, apparently.
Back when I was quite young, I figured I’d take my husband’s name as a matter of course. When I was older (23) and actually looking down the barrel of a marriage, I figured I’d take his name as a matter of romance and tradition and blah blah blah unitycakes. Since then, that relationship has fallen through and I’ve gotten myself a big, thick binder full of articles (and a couple of manuscripts) written under my own name, and I’ve kind of grown attached to it. The man who wants me to put his name in place of my own is going to have a more convincing argument than I’ve yet heard.
I took my wife’s last name when we married four years ago and it was relatively painless. The marriage license in Wisconsin didn’t have a space for it, but they had this other little addendum form to go with it. The DMV people here in Seattle were a little confused but nobody mocked me–this is Seattle, though. The only person who gave me crap about it was, ironically, my great aunt on my dad’s side who had herself changed HER name when she got married decades ago.
One unexpected drawback is that since my wife and I have the same last name many people just assume that she was the one who changed her name, which makes me feel odd for having unintentionally brought such judgments on her.
By the way, the thing with MIT philosophers Yablo and Haslanger is pretty cool, but within the profession they are both still known by those previous names, not their mash-up.
I suppose it dodged the issue completely, but I always thought it was cool that Patti Smith married Fred Sonic Smith.
We got a wedding card and check from a friend of my mom’s the other day, and while the card was addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Landes� like several others (groan), the check was also paid to the order of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Landes. I went to the bank and endorsed it with my name and was about to have it deposited in my (separate! gasp) bank account when the teller informed my husband that the check couldn’t go through unless he co-endorsed it.
Well, yeah, because the check was made out to BOTH of you. His money, too. If someone made a check out to both you and your sister, you’d both have to endorse it. Not so much patriarchy as fraud prevention there.
If my husband and I received a check made out to both of us, I’d be mighty pissed to discover he’d deposited it in his personal account without telling me.
I didn’t want to change my name to hers, but would have if she asked.
I didn’t demand she change hers.
She hated her father and wanted to distance herself from him, and took my last name.
Not all women who change their names are bowing to patriarchy. Not all men who go along with a name change are assholes.
Hah! Sorry to disappoint you, pablo, this is just a handle. So yes, it’s from Borges.
Not buying your excuses, Cointreau. Why do you think only women seem to hate their names and change them? If she hated her name that much, why didn’t she change it before?
My dad co-signed on my mortgage, and even though he lives in another state and doesn’t contribute financially, I still get mail addressed to Mrs. Dad Lastname. It’s yucky when it’s addressed to my mom, and yuckier when it’s addressed to me.
I had a friend who was planning on getting married. They decided to choose a new name: O’Reiser. Her nickname was Mel and his was Hank– and I thought “Mel O’Reiser” sounded great. (They never got married, though, which was for the best.)
I’ve got an extremely unusual Ukrainian-roots last name, which probably got mangled into its present form during the family’s peripatic wanders through the countries of Eastern Europe. No one knows how to spell is, which I find amusing since it is spelled exactly as it sounds. And since I do a lot of work with Japan, I’m constantly getting people thinking it’s a Japanese name and getting my first and last names mixed up.
But me giving it up upon marriage if that ever happens? Nope. Too old, too much water under the bridge, too much stuff published under my own name, and too much hassle.
The only name change I’ve been interested in carrying out is my first name (which is in nickname form) to the full-blown polysyllabic form. Heck, my mother was reading War and Peace when I was born….
I think there’s a perfectly simple reason why women tend (on average) to be less attached to their last names then men. Most girls are brought up with an explicit assumption that their name will change at some point in their lives. I know it wasn’t uncommon in middle school for the girls to experiment with what their name would be if they married their current crush. Boys on the other hand get to assume from the very start that their name is theirs, and that they will be known by that name for their whole lives. Naturally some of those girls are going to grow up into women that are only lightly attached to their last names - they’ve been practicisng for giving them up their whole lives.
My brother is the fourth in line of the same name, and once in a while he gets mail addressed to a “Mr. Iv.” Morons.
Several years back I changed my name. I’m not married and never plan to be and at any rate would never change my name again, ‘cause this one is mine. I was originally only going to change my first name, mostly for religious reasons (I’m Pagan, and my birth name was Mary Elizabeth–that’s almost as much a nun’s name as Mary Margaret, and no thanks.) Then a friend suggested I just change the whole thing, since I was never really attached to my dad or his name. I considered my mom’s maiden name, since I’ve always identified with that (crazy, artistic, descended from a heretic burnt at the stake) family far more. But to me that was still her dad’s name, not her own. I don’t agree that it was HER name; it’s the name of the men of the family back and back and back, which in effect is saying that the women don’t exist.
So then that left me with choosing a last name; I asked myself, “If I could belong to any family in the world, which would I choose?” And came up with “Took”, which still cracks me up when I say it. But then one of the major motives behind the name change was to redefine myself, and comedy (my first name is Thalia, which is the name of the Goddess of Comedy, and which means “She Who Thrives”) and humor was a main theme. Damn but I love my name now, “Thalia Took”. Hee hee hee.
Though not one person has yet asked if I’m related to Pippin, so I guess I’m the only one who gets it.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a pharmacy student I was on rotation with. He was engaged, and he said he wouldn’t marry a girl if she wouldn’t take his last name. I said that I wouldn’t marry anyone who would force me to change my name.
We didn’t talk much after that.
My sister’s getting married. She doesn’t like her fiance’s last name and she does like her last name, but she’s gonna change her name to his anyway. Because that’s just the Way Things Are. And nothing I say to her will cause her to even reconsider. Sad.
I have no immediate plans to get married, but if I did I wouldn’t change my last name as an intentional feminist move - even though I like my SO’s last name better than my own. Which makes me wonder: am I being as sad and stubborn as my sister, just in the opposite direction?
It’s funny that so many women didn’t have a “feminist awareness” when they got married at age 20 or so - I was bothered by the mandatory name change when I was six, and I was raised an anti-feminist conservative Catholic! But the answers I got (”It doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t mean women are inferior, it’s just Tradition”) didn’t satisfy me, and why then didn’t *men* change their names? if it didn’t matter– I didn’t buy it, and it was one of many faultlines that made the attempt to indoctrinate me into being a good little natalist housewife or nun a doomed effort.
OTOH, I’ve never felt like I belonged to my family, or any of my legal names being *me*, not my current one, not the one of my sperm donor and mother’s first husband, and while since I have no intention or expectation of ever getting married, the *truest* thing would be a fannish ceremony (because non-fan spouse is automatically out) - “Do you, Bellatrys the Philosopher-at-Large, take Commander Sonak…”
My family wasn’t all that conservative, but I was seven when I watched my mom pay bills, signing the checks “Mrs John Q. Doe, Jr.” (okay, not that, but you get the idea)… this is basically what transpired:
Me: Why are you writing Daddy’s name?- your name is Harriet, not John.
Mom: Because when people get married, the woman is usually known by the man’s name, at least on business stuff.
Me: But why? That seems dumb. I don’t want someone else’s name.
Mom: Well, that’s just how people usually do it.
Me: But I don’t WANT to! What if I marry someone with a stupid name, like Dennis’s?
Mom (clearly irritated): Well, no one’s going to make you do it; in fact, no one’s going to make you get married. Now go on so I can get these in the mail.
Me (wandering off, muttering): Getting married sounds dumb.
And my first impression hasn’t changed.
The reason the INS doesn’t question female mail order brides is sexist bias, frankly. After all, the guys gotta have their submissive foreign women. I believe Elena’s the Russian mail-order bride apologist from Alas.
I thought I’d add this personal tidbit, since it’s Texas in nature — and the couple in question reside in Austin.
About 4 years ago, two friends of mine got married. They decided to swap last names. They went down to the DMV one Friday morning, with their marriage license and all the required documents.
The wife is done in five minutes. She waits almost twenty minutes before her husband comes out, where he complains that they said he couldn’t change his last name. He’d have to go to court.
So he does what any 30-something IT geek would do — he posted about it on a forum. A number of people (including myself) located the relevent section of Texas law on names changes after a marriage, which was modified a few years before to change “wife” to “spouse”. As best we could tell, the change meant that Texas was officially gender-neutral on this issue. Anyone’s name could be changed via the same process.
Armed with this knowledge and a hardcopy of the law, he treks down there again, only to be denied.
We help him locate his state Rep. His Rep responds to the question with remarkable speed — perhaps an hour from the leaving of the message to the callback from an aide. The aide assures my friend that his reading of the law is quite correct, and that he’s called the DMV office, spoken to whomever was in charge, and informed them of it. It is stressed that if there is ANY problem, to call the Rep again.
It’s now 3:00 PM. My friend treks down there again, only to be denied again. The workers there are getting a bit pissy about it too.
He goes home, calls his Rep. He gets a return call promptly, informing him that the Rep is going to handle it and that his name WILL get changed that day, but not to go back to the DMV office until the Rep lets him know.
(I used DMV this whole time, but I think it’s actually called something else in Texas. I only visit that hellhole to renew my license).
At 4:50, he gets a call. It’s from the state Rep personally. He informs my friend that the office has been contacted by the head of the agency, that they have been informed they will stay open until such time as his name change is processed.
He gets there at 5:15, and it’s done in five minutes. I wish I could remember the Rep’s name, but my friend swears he’d vote for the guy for life.
Well, yeah, because the check was made out to BOTH of you. His money, too. If someone made a check out to both you and your sister, you’d both have to endorse it. Not so much patriarchy as fraud prevention there.
Don’t get me wrong–I’m not blaming the bank policy. I totally understand the fraud aspect, and I certainly wouldn’t have been perturbed if my husband had to co-endorse a check made out to Bridget [My last name] and Joe Landes, or even Joe and Bridget Landes. That makes perfect sense. It’s just…how was I supposed to endorse this check? My husband is “Mr. Joe Landes.” Once you subtract him from the equation, so to speak, that leaves me as “Mrs.” My name isn’t “Mrs.” Am I just expected to sign “Mrs.”, or “Mrs. Joe Landes,” without even the benefit of a first name (which might be kind of useful, considering it’s going in my account)?
To use your example, it’s like if someone addressed a check to “Bridget [my last name] & her sister.” What would my sister sign?
What would my sister sign?
Her name.
What would my sister sign?
The check?
(Sorry.)
Some friends of mine got married last spring, and circulated a notice with their wedding invitation that “Neither [groom] nor [bride] will be changing their names.”
The bride then found herself in the position of having to explain her decision to her female relatives, who had all changed their names. She started with her real (and rather standard) reasons (”It’s the name I grew up with, it’s mine”), but that didn’t go over well. She then pointed out that if she adopted her husband’s surname, she’d have rhyming first and last names. Her relatives weren’t swayed; it was her wifely duty, they explained, to suck it up and suffer the lifelong indignity of bearing a goofy name - out of respect for her husband’s family. (FWIW, said husband’s mother never changed her name, and she married back in the 70’s. The husband’s family certainly wasn’t pressuring the bride to change her name - in fact, I’d wager that the husband’s mother didn’t go through the ordeal of keeping her name only to have her daughter-in-law change hers.)
Finally, the bride started explaining her decision thusly: “I really wanted to change my name, but my husband won’t let me, and he’s the one who makes the decisions about these sorts of things.”
Her family found this acceptable.
My wife and I have argued about this recently. Not relating to her name, but relating to our (possible, future) children’s last names. My wife kept her maiden name. I’m not ecstatic about that, but I respected her choice to do so.
I don’t understand some of the choices that people have made throughout this thread. On the one hand, names seem very important because very few of the women here are willing to change their name to their husband’s name. But on the other hand, the name seems unimportant and haphazard where you smoosh the old last names together to “create” a new one, or rename yourself the Jetsons, or have half your kids with one last name and half with another.
I don’t get it. To me, the name is important. Kinship is important. Being able to TRACK kinship is important. As a guy who’s read a lot of anthropology, I know that there are multiple systems for tracking kinship, but we happen to be in one that does it by the father’s last name. I don’t see this as inherently bad. There is certainly a cost to rejecting it.
The question for me is: “Does the gain for rejecting this patrilineal system that we live in outweigh the cost?” It isn’t clear to me that it does, but apparently I am a sexist asshole for thinking this.
wow, i’m late to the thread here, but i read pretty much all of it and feel happy that so many people have mused about this and come up with so many cool schemes. a couple people even mentioned the exact one that boyfriend and i have come to favor (keep your names and then, if eventually there are children to “think of!”, alternate naming the kids after yourselves; like someone else said, of course they’ll still “know they’re family”). but i really like the “pick a new name / the jetsons” idea and had never thought of that before.
anyway, um, so that’s all.
I didn’t change my name when I got married, and neither did my husband. We agreed that the kids would get his last name, in part because there are already nieces and nephews on my side with my last name to carry it forward, and on his side he is the only boy in a family with many traditional people, and so his last name will die with him if we don’t give it to the kids (and, seeing as he is the only boy in his very large family, we suspect that we will have girls, making the “girls get my name, boys get his” approach less likely to carry his name forward). So, we’ve thought about it, and sure there is some bowing to the patriarchy, but in anything familial I think that some amount of picking of battles is part of living a reasonably happy, if partially corrupt, life. Not changing any names creates some confusion, but generally people are fine with an easy correction.
Emily,
How would you determine which of your 2 surnames to use? Is there a convention or is it a random choice?
Each child is named after the first family name of each parent. In my case, I got Ortega from my father and Garcia from my mother. The moment I have children from my current partner, they’d be named Rodriguez Ortega by default. Although, depending on some countries, the parents can switch the surnames’ order so that the woman’s one comes first. We could then name our kids Ortega Rodriguez. Also, anyone can switch his or her own family names’ order at any time of his/her life, provided he o she’s older than 18. So I could decide to switch my own family names at no cost and call myself Garcia Ortega; this would obviously mean that Garcia would become the family name to be inherited by my future children.
Sounds a little complicated at first, but hey, we keep our identities all life long!
Hurrycane: Don’t you dare accuse me of propping up patriarchy by doing something I wanted to do.
You wanted to prop up the patriarchy by adopting your husband’s surname, yet you don’t want to be accused of propping up the patriarchy? Okay.
plunky: I don’t see this as inherently bad. There is certainly a cost to rejecting it.
It is inherently bad: it means that people find it impossibly difficult to trace kinship via the mothers. That’s one cost of not rejecting it.
“Does the gain for rejecting this patrilineal system that we live in outweigh the cost?� It isn’t clear to me that it does, but apparently I am a sexist asshole for thinking this.
Very perceptive of you. But, the next step on from realizing that you are a sexist asshole is to work on not being a sexist asshole. How are you doing with that?
BridgetKa - that’s when you ignore the teller, ask for a manager, and yell and scream. And then kindly take your banking elsewhere if they don’t budge. The free market is a great thing.
Incidentally, if this was not a small bank, which one was it? (Just want to know where to NOT bank.)
What if we just used place names instead of last names? Like, Julian of Saint Louis, or, if you prefer, Julian de Saint Lous, or Julian von Saint Louis?
Or maybe we could have names which generally contained relevant information about us? For example, what if my name included the fact that I have type 0+ blood, or any allergies I had?
I suppose it’s a mixed bag, Neil. There are some nifty male privileges that all men get, then there’s BS like the name change hassles.
Not necessarily Patsy… I changed my name, but my husband literally did not give a shit. I did it just because that’s what you do, and when I was filling out the marriage license, the husband was like “Oh, you’re changing your name?” To which I replied “Yeah, unless you don’t want me to or something?” and his reponse was “It’s your name, it’s really not up to me what you do with it. Change it if you want, but I don’t care if you keep your name now either”. Now that we have kids I think he’s happier that I changed it, but he’s really pretty easy going, I don’t see him caring too much.
Bellatrys… mine has a lot to do with the house I was raised in. My mom thinks it’s stupid not to change your name and probably would have been mortified if I kept my maiden name. Ditto for my father. My mom is also anti-abortion, anti-mothers working outside the home, anti-premartial sex, etc… It was a pretty conservative household, one step removed from total wingnuttery only by the fact that my mother (but not my dad) believes in birth control. I didn’t even start entertaining feminist ideas until after I was married and only recently (within the last year) became comfortable calling myself a feminist, identifying as a feminist and exploring feminist ideals. It’s hard when you’re in that environment every single day, being told that feminists are evil, horrible people who want to kill babies and destroy families to get a clear feminst identity. The farther I get away from the insanity, the more I realize just how feminist I really am.
I also agree with tapetum… I never got all that attached to my last name, because I never really expected to keep it. All through high school I had a steady boyfriend and I always imagined I would have his name as an adult, so even though I ended up married to someone else, I really wasn’t that attached to my last name. Like I said before, looking back I probably would’ve thought a lot harder about changing it, but because I got married so young it didn’t really affect anything, my college degrees are both in my married name and pretty much every job I have was as Julie Married Name as opposed to Julie Maiden Name. If I were to grow up with the same assumption as men, that my name was a part of my identity, something to be proud of and something important, I probably would’ve kept it. I know it’s patriarchal though, to be sure.
For God’s sake, think of the geneaologists!
Seriously, I beg of you to consider making your marriage and offspring easy to track in the long-term future.
Inventing new surnames, combining surnames, or naming half the kids with one parent’s surname and the other half with the other parent’s will really make it difficult for your great-great-grandkids when they try to trace their roots.
“Seriously, I beg of you to consider making your marriage and offspring easy to track in the long-term future.”
Seems to me that changing the husbands name will do that just as well.
But then I don’t really see how public records of name changes are going to make it more difficult for our great-great-grandkids to track us down.
The question is what to do with the kids.
Step One on what to do with the kids: let go of the idea that Dad has an absolute male-privilege right to ‘continue the line’ by passing on his name.
HALLELUJAH !!!
It never ceases to amaze me how many so called feminists never even dare to question this sexist tradition.
From Tapetum:
“Most girls are brought up with an explicit assumption that their name will change at some point in their lives…Boys on the other hand get to assume from the very start that their name is theirs, and that they will be known by that name for their whole lives. Naturally some of those girls are going to grow up into women that are only lightly attached to their last names.”
This is true, and is a big part of the whole name-changing problem. The idea that women’s surnames represent their families and men’s surnames represent themselves made sense when a woman was supposed to be defined by her family service, first to her father (by marrying a high-status man) and then to her husband. Women starting to own their last names, the way men do, is a byproduct of them defining themselves in relation to their own goals and achievements.
Another part of the problem, I think, is the assumption that a lineage doesn’t count for women if it has a mostly patriarchal history. If males have been passing a surname down to their children for a long time, that doesn’t mean we, now, have to think that it’s less significant for a woman to pass it on just because that’s not how it worked in the past. If a name, invention, literary tradition, whatever, was sustained primarily by men for men’s use for centuries, and women have finally gotten access to it, we can either avoid investing energy into a male project and look for an alternate, or collaborate and make it a female project as well.
(The analogy isn’t perfect, but I’m putting surnames in as a “project” because it’s a way a group of people try to leave their signature on society, in a way. Also I don’t mean at all that tracing your matriarchal lineage and using that isn’t great. At least for me there’s good feeling when I can identify some achievement I’m proud of as being grounded in other women’s work though time. (I don’t want kids so I’m kind of conflating getting an invention or something named after you with getting a person named after you…) Just, that women can be a part of something great even if used to be a male thing.)
If a name was intended for hundreds of years to represent only a male line, and so we say it still represents only that, aren’t we just buying into the idea we’re trying to escape from? It seems to me that this makes more sense than saying a woman’s surname is less “hers” than her brother’s is, just because he got it from the same-sex parent/grandparent/etc and she didn’t.
I was already thoroughly feminist when I got married (at age 26), and I told my first husband I’d never change my name upon marriage. It was a total non-issue with him and his family.
My family members asked me if I’d considered changing my name, but I told them no because my first husband is Muslim and brown, and I wasn’t interested in being known as Mrs. Mohammed Ahmed Nizar Abdul, or even Tonya Abdul.
After 9/11, it got a whole lot easier to explain that I didn’t want to be mis-identified as Middle Eastern (I grew up in the South, and am dark, but not brown), and everyone was pretty encouraging toward me, especially if anything regarding air travel was ever mentioned.
Now that I’m divorced, however, I’m still firm on the whole not-changing-my-name thing. The only way is if I and my SO were questioned about our identities by people who didn’t need to know.
I’d throw a Blade Runner reference at them and tell them I was Rachael, and introduce my SO as Rick Deckard.
Just an aside, but women in west Africa retain their names after marriage, although i wouldn’t call them liberated. They are polygamous and patrilineal.
The name change issue to me is wrapped up in historical efforts by society to make women both invisible and fungible. A woman being called “Mrs. Joshua Radisson” is not called by a name, but rather a social title, as any vintage etiquette guide will tell you (and tell you proudly, as it references a woman who, having come out at a debutante ball into “society” has now acquired her position as wife in the household of a man of rank). Should the first Mrs. Joshua Radisson be severed from her position by divorce or death, she will be replaced by the second (or subsequent) Mrs. Joshua Radisson upon his remarriage. Indeed, the old school types would take great issue with calling a woman Mrs. Juliette Radisson, because, while her name may be Juliette Radisson, the use of “Mrs.” signifies her relation to her husband and, without reference to his name, she has no title. And in that respect, “Ms.” would actually be a more appropriate title for a woman using her first name/last name combination, would the “Ms.” title not have been an abomination to anyone truly old school on the simple basis of not relying entirely on the patriarchal power structure. The real traditions that go back as far as, say, the Victorian era in the United States, were intended to see a woman as invisible but for her relationship to her husband, and to be fungible insofar as she was merely an accoutrement — not specifically chattel, but certainly not an independent entity in any legal or social sense. Women of this time generally would not bristle at these concepts or be defensive at their mention, as it was considered the natural order of things.
In any event, a funny reversal of this sense of invisibility took place in my life recently. My husband and I met with a fertility specialist, and all of the medical files and history are being kept under my name. No doubt this is somewhat done because the treatment of a woman’s infertility issues are thornier, and the tests more complex, than those of a man, and also it is likely the legacy of a sexist assumption that the inability to conceive is the woman’s fault, with a man’s contribution to be fertile until proven otherwise (as one doctor — in a social context, not a professional one — said to me, “you know, infertility isn’t always a woman’s fault” Yes, I know. And I know you’re an asshole). But my husband found himself in the odd position of being lumped in, of not really counting in his own right, and there was an evident sense of awkwardness that here was a moment in our marriage — and in his attempt at fatherhood — where his contribution was being treated as an afterthought. While it didn’t please me to see it, preferring an approach treating us as equals, it reawakened me to the various times that, for example, people refer to me by his last name in social correspondence or otherwise do less than respect to my choices as an individual and I shrug it off because I do not want to make waves, and it raised his consciousness in a way that intellectually appreciating the times that I am made to feel invisible by society can’t really accomplish.
Really??
That wasn’t the case with me. Isn’t that in the same basket as planning your wedding since you were in kindergarten? In which case, what is “natural” about that?
Um, ginmar? That is exactly what I said except, you know, using sarcasm. Elena’s a pretty common name, you know? But as someone who grew up in Russia instead of just thinking I understand it because I visited a few times, I understand why Russian women want to do it and I’m not going to blame them for the choices that they’ve been forced into by capitalism and sexism.
Oh, and an addendum to the check thing: when my husband has deposited checks paid to the order of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Landes in his account (our system has been that money from his family goes into his account and money from my family goes into my account), I have never once had to co-endorse, or even be present. Not patriarchy my arse. It’s patently clear that he is the person and I am not.
I decided my last name had to go when I was six years old. It’s the horrible way the other kids sneered all those long e’s, like my last name was the most horrible insult in the world. I couldn’t wait to dump it. Hell, I vow that if I didn’t get married by age 21, I’d change my last name to my maternal grandmother’s maiden name.
I got married at age 21, to a guy whose last name has an x on the end, and is far cooler than my grandmother’s maiden name. So I promptly caved to the patriarchy, and justified it by saying I’d planned to change my name anyway, which I had, but still…
We had a son, who got the “family” name, and then split up. When the divorce was final, he tried to get me to change my name back to my maiden name, because he “wanted his name back.” I told him to fuck off, I’d taken this name fair and square and I’m keeping it. It links me to my son, it sounds way better than all those blasted long e’s, and, hey, gotta love the x on the end.
Should I ever remarry, which is entirely unlikely, I will keep this name. It’s mine, I like it, that’s that.
Make of that what you will.
Though it’s annoying that people still automatically assume that my wife and I have the same last name (sometimes people who have our correct names stated and signed on legal documents), there are minor compensations. People (especially phone solicitors and restaurant staff) who know Sam’s name but not mine address me as “Mr. Wilkinson” all the time. While I didn’t actually change my name, I’ve sort of started to think of “Matt Wilkinson” as my other name, sort of like how Kathy McCarty above has her rockstar name and her alias. I’m even publicly identified as Matt Wilkinson on a web page. I was thinking about correcting it but I don’t really mind.
As for child naming conventions, we gave our daughter my last name (I don’t pretend this was anything other than a concession to patriarchal bureaucratic convention) but her mother’s last name is her middle name, an approach that I think is more elegant than hyphenation (either that way or the other way around).
Regardless of what you choose, I wouldn’t lose much sleep over the travails of future genealogists.
We did that, and as for why the name change?Because now I get to introduce myself as “Mrs. Cool Pain.”
Not everyone gets that sort of opportunity, you know!
Inventing new surnames, combining surnames, or naming half the kids with one parent’s surname and the other half with the other parent’s will really make it difficult for your great-great-grandkids when they try to trace their roots.
Ah yes, the “sacrifice your name to genealogists not yet born” argument. What transparent crap. What this really means is that the genealogist in question is a) lazy or b) doesn’t give a shit about anything except tracing the male line.
but we happen to be in one that does it by the father’s last name. I don’t see this as inherently bad.
Actually, if you live in America, you happen to be in one that allows people to choose not only their last names, but their children’s. You don’t see a patriarchal naming system as “inherently bad” because you’re male and you think your wife and children should give up their names to adopt yours.
If you have time to fret over what last name your children will have, you don’t have much to worry about. The children will only have the same last name as, on average, a minority of their relatives in any case, so what’s the biggie? In my experience children have no trouble figuring out who’s family. Seriously, they can remember more than one surname. Otherwise, grandparents would be exceedingly confusing to them.
As to future genealogists? Screw ‘em. What have they done for me?
BridgetKa - Your spouse being ale to deposit without your signature on checks directed to both of you just means they are making an exception for him to the rules (likely an expression of patriarchy via outdated common practice).
Are you certain it isn’t because people from his side have the sense to send the checks as “Mr. OR Mrs.”? If a check is addressed to “or” it can be signed by either to be cashed or placed into either person’s account.
If the check says “Mr. AND Mrs.”, or really any person A & person B, they are supposed to require both to sign unless the money is being deposited into a joint account. As mentioned previously, this is a fraud issue and most banks have this as formal policy as well as under the federal banking guidelines.
Drat. That should be “being able”, not “being ale”.
“It is inherently bad: it means that people find it impossibly difficult to trace kinship via the mothers. That’s one cost of not rejecting it.”
This is true. Women’s names do fall off the chart if they are not propagated by their male relatives. But most folks in this thread are not suggesting an alternate _system_ that will result in anything but everyone’s name falling off the chart. To be clear here, I’m not talking only about genealogists hundreds of years in the future having problems, but also just cousins, nieces, coworkers etc who understand the default system and will have to have each separate oddity explained to them.
The Latin American system seems most equitable, and has improved my opinion of hyphenated last names, which seems to be the nearest US equivalent.
“Seems to me that changing the husbands name will do that just as well.”
This, however, is not true. Changing the husband’s name randomly will simply result in confusion, and your “branch” not lasting. Unless you can convince the rest of society that a matrilineal system is the way to go (which would have just as much of an equity problem).
Mythago, I recognize that there is privilege here, but your personal attack strangely has not swayed me into changing my opinion.
In my first marriage I kept my own surname (I hated my first husband’s surname. After three years I also hated him, but I’ve mentioned that elsewhere…) It caused me no problems at all (except with his family, who insisted on calling me Mrs [his surname], but that’s really only to be expected given the sort of people they were) and made it a lot easier for me after the divorce. In my second marriage I took my partner’s surname, because I much preferred it to my own. (I still do.)
In August 2000 I legally changed my first two names, which I’d always loathed, to what they are now. It cost me £15 (about $8 at today’s exchange rate) and while it required a fair bit of personal paperwork - sending off copies of the document to bank/mortgage society/various legal and admin agencies asking them to amend their records etc - it all went very smoothly and didn’t cost me another penny. I think we have (had? I don’t know if it’s still that simple) a more sensible system over here. Though that being said my passport is now due for renewal, and that’s going to be fun: I’ll need to send off old passport, birth certificate, first marriage licence, decree absolute, second marriage licence, change of name document, plus a letter explaining the sequence of events. Wonder how long it’ll take them to process it?
Plunky: To be clear here, I’m not talking only about genealogists hundreds of years in the future having problems, but also just cousins, nieces, coworkers etc who understand the default system and will have to have each separate oddity explained to them.
Then let’s change the default system! The new default system is: Any adult has a right to adopt any damn name they please, so long as they aren’t doing so with intent to defraud. And everyone - adult or child - has a right to retain their own name for as long as it pleases them.
The idea that cousins and nephews just won’t understand that if Mary Blaine was Mary Blaine before her marriage and is still Mary Blaine now she’s married (no matter what her husband’s name happens to be) and all her children are Childname Blaine… is really extreme crap.
As for co-workers: screw ‘em. If a co-worker can’t remember what your name is, put a little plaque on your desk to remind them.
I’m not buying the geneaology argument– people have always managed to sort through multiple marriages among their forebears (due to widowhood more often than divorce, I’m sure), children being adopted by wealthier relatives, and so on, not to mention the variations in spelling that happens over generations (my family name was traced with four spellings by a distant cousin, and he didn’t even touch several more variations). I also remember that when my mom died and we had to deal with two married names as well as her three birth ones on a tiny columbarium plate, the church staff strongly advised including her birth surname for genealogical reasons… her first married name was my dad’s, and he second was the one she actually used for more of her adult life, mostly for convenience’s sake, after divorcing husband #2.
Anyway, ‘maiden’ names actually help geneaologists more often than not– access to marriage records has always been critical, and the names used after marriage don’t really matter that much as long as the records are accurate.
Oh, and while it wasn’t common, there have certainly been cases going back over hundreds of years of men taking their wives’ family names, usually due to greater wealth and status and/or a lack of heirs in her line. It’s sort of the exception that proves the rule that the people who carry the name are more important, isn’t it?
Speaking of “hypersyllabic Balkan monstrosities”, I was willing to change my last name but my uber-feminist wife insisted that she take my last name for reasons known only to her.
Here is a cool story of how one couple decided on their last names.
“Then let’s change the default system! The new default system is: Any adult has a right to adopt any damn name they please, so long as they aren’t doing so with intent to defraud. And everyone - adult or child - has a right to retain their own name for as long as it pleases them.”
See my first post for my opinion on this. You are free to attempt to do this, but I don’t get the two things you’re saying at once. Is the name important or isn’t it? Of course people can choose to legally change their name to anything they want. The question is, is that good or helpful? IMHO, it is not, because it dilutes the whole idea of kinship/family/whatever for a more chaotic nonsystem. If you WANT a chaotic nonsystem to subvert the patriarchy, more power to you.
“The idea that cousins and nephews just won’t understand that if Mary Blaine was Mary Blaine before her marriage and is still Mary Blaine now she’s married (no matter what her husband’s name happens to be) and all her children are Childname Blaine… is really extreme crap.”
You are probably right that it is extreme crap from a purely intellectual feminist standpoint. However, half my relatives are devout Catholics and pretty conservative. Regardless of its extreme crapitude, I’d be paying a high price in all of my dealings with them were we to randomly name our children. The easy response at this point is to say “well, that’s THEIR problem”. I don’t live in a vacuum, or want to.
That link is hilarious Coturnix.
“The easy response at this point is to say “well, that’s THEIR problemâ€?.”
Isn’t that what you’re saying to the people in these comments?
You, basically: “They want to contribute to a social change, so the same rights and options will be available to both adults… But what about the family tree diagrams?!?! Think of the branches, you unfeeling feminists!”
Plus, the whole thing with wanting to change your name because your father is an asshole isn’t about not wanting a man’s name, it’s about not wanting to be named after that one man.
Patently untrue. People who care passionately about not having the same last name as their fathers don’t wait until they get married to change it. That wouldn’t make any sense. “Oh, I hate my last name. Boy, I hope I meet a man I can marry sometime in the next twenty years so I don’t have to carry it around forever!”
Right. Except not.
If you hate your name, you legally change it. Now. What’s that got to do with marriage and your theoretical future husband’s name? Nothing.
No Sea, that’s not what I said. Thanks for making it up though.
If you hate your name, you legally change it. Now. What’s that got to do with marriage and your theoretical future husband’s name? Nothing.
Actually, I know one man and one woman who have done this… interestingly, she changed her name again on marriage. Her reasoning (okay, beside the fact that she’s one of those if-most-people-do-it-it-must-be-right types)? Well, it wasn’t her original name anyway, so making the change again is no big deal. When asked hypothetically if he would change his name on marriage, the man who had already changed his name once said that of course he wouldn’t; he’d chosen that name and it meant something to him.
joules, i think you did the exchange rate backward — 15 pounds ought to be about $30.
i only nitpick because last month i spent a week in scotland and went broke. (the ticket was nearly-free b/c of frequent flyer miles; it was, you know, feeding myself and drinking ale that really did me in.)
Forget all the rest of it. I’m getting married later this year, and I want to be the Jetsons.
I must admit to being a feminist who happily took my husband’s name when I got married. I hated my maiden name. It was an odd name and we moved frequently when I was a kid, so I was teased unmercifully my entire life over having a horrible name.
Now, as I am contemplating getting rid of the husband, I am in a quandry about the name thing. I don’t want to keep his, but I absolutely do not want to take back my original. Ideally, I think I might like to have my mom’s maiden name.
Personally, I would like to see the general standard work its way toward women keeping their names and female children getting that name and male children getting the dad’s name. But that’s just me.
I’m a little late coming back to the thread (and there’s tons of interesting new replies!).
QUOTE
>apm
Emily, How would you determine which of your 2 surnames to use? Is there a convention or is it a random choice?
> elgie
Each child is named after the first family name of each parent. In my case, I got Ortega from my father and Garcia from my mother. The moment I have children from my current partner, they’d be named Rodriguez Ortega by default. Although, depending on some countries, the parents can switch the surnames’ order so that the woman’s one comes first. We could then name our kids Ortega Rodriguez. Also, anyone can switch his or her own family names’ order at any time of his/her life, provided he o she’s older than 18. So I could decide to switch my own family names at no cost and call myself Garcia Ortega; this would obviously mean that Garcia would become the family name to be inherited by my future children. Sounds a little complicated at first, but hey, we keep our identities all life long!
UNQUOTE
Yup, pretty much what elgie said. In some countries you pass down the father’s first surname; in other countries you pass down the mother’s first surname. I’ve never even considered it complicated, because well, I grew up with that and it has made sense to me all my life.
———-
QUOTE
> Isabel
Me too! I was born in Puerto Rico and when we moved to the states for a couple years I was going by my dad’s name, but it sounded weird to me and I lived with my mom (I’d drop the dad’s last name entirley, since we haven’t spoken in like 6 years, but then I would have a named uncomfortably similar to a singer’s. Think Christine Aguilera). Also, I have grown kind of fond of my unwieldy, ethnically-nonsensical (despite being Puerto Rican, my last name somehow wound up Basque-English) name.
UNQUOTE
Yay, another Puerto Rican! I was born there also and moved to the States when I was 22 to go to grad school. I like both my surnames, but I find it annoying when people address me by my second surname, because that’s a completely different person. In my middle school there was a girl one year ahead of me who was named “Emily SecondSurname”, where “SecondSurname” is in fact, my second surname. She wasn’t related to me or anything, but her first surname was my second surname, and her second surname was something else (I forget what). One of the nuns (Catholic school *shudder*), who taught religion class for the 7th-9th grades, and who wasn’t Puerto Rican, would always confuse our names and give me her grades! I was a straight-A student, and she was a C-student. Needless to say, that annoyed me a lot. When someone calls me “Emily SecondSurname”, I don’t really get that they’re talking/writing to ME until a few moments later, because well, that’s not my name (and it’s also the name of this girl from middle school who almost ruined my grades through no fault of her own). I don’t feel all that weird when someone calls me “Emily FirstSurname”, because that’s how you shorten names in PR. But I always prefer to be addressed with both surnames, as that is my complete name.
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QUOTE
> plunky
The Latin American system seems most equitable, and has improved my opinion of hyphenated last names, which seems to be the nearest US equivalent.
UNQUOTE
That’s how I see hyphenated names also. Like I said, I have a hyphenated name only because I was getting problems from all over with people assuming my first surname was a middle name, so I inserted a hyphen. But some people still get confused *sigh*
———-
QUOTE
> Hurrycane
I took my husband’s last name when I married him. I’m sorry that offends some of you so much. Oh wait — no, I’m not. It was my choice and I wanted to do it, for reasons that were almost entirely aesthetic. Don’t you dare accuse me of propping up patriarchy by doing something I wanted to do. The opinions of strangers didn’t factor into my decision, and they still don’t.
> C. Diane
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a pharmacy student I was on rotation with. He was engaged, and he said he wouldn’t marry a girl if she wouldn’t take his last name. I said that I wouldn’t marry anyone who would force me to change my name.
UNQUOTE
These two posts remind me of a thread about married names that I followed on a forum recently. Some people were for changing last names; some were for not changing last names, some were indifferent to the whole thing, etc. But there was a guy there claiming that he would not marry a woman who refused to take his last name. That made my eyebrow twitch. He also claimed that keeping one name for the entire family makes it easy to track down ancestors. I mentioned in a reply that I’ve traced my family history, both sides of it, all the way back to my great-great grandparents (earlier than that I couldn’t find any records), through the magic of each person in a marriage keeping both their surnames intact. Of course, this is how I was raised and how my culture does these things. Sometimes it gets to be a problem when cultures come together and clash on the issue…
I’m going to quote here a post that I made on that forum, as a reply to that same guy when he got belligerent and claimed his point of view was the only valid one. What I wrote there pretty much sums up my position on the whole thing:
In my case, I enjoy my surnames. They are mine, my surnames, part of my identity as a human being. They represent my parents (both of them), my culture, my heritage, and I am proud of that. I’m also already known in my particular field of work as “Emily Surname1-Surname2″, and I want to keep it that way so that my body of work doesn’t get lost in surname changes. And I want my kids to have part of their heritage reflected in their name.
I don’t judge anyone who decides to change surnames upon marriage, or to not change surnames, or to hyphenate with the spouse’s surname, or to melt both surnames into a new one, or whatever other option. To each their own, of course, and tastes vary. But for me, personally, the choice is to keep my name intact. And since this discussion is on that topic, well, I am presenting arguments here for my position, and other people post arguments on their positions as well. There’s no right or wrong, just personal preferences and opinions, differences in cultures and traditions, and a plethora of other things that affect someone’s position on this subject matter.
My partner and I picked a new last name (based on common themes in our lives and a love of the ocean) and both changed. Our decision was met with some resistance from parents, but we did it. We were married in FL, but we had to change our names in New Mexico, where we lived. LIke the man in the story, we had to go through the courts, promise we weren’t changing them for running out on debt, PAY a goodly sum, and run ads in a rinky-dink paper announcing the forthcoming change. We felt our decision was best for everyone involved.
Rocket Girl -
A friend of mine told me the following story which as far as I know it is true:
She was getting divorced from her husband and did NOT want to keep his last name. Also, hated her maiden name intensely so didn’t want to take that back. Didn’t want her mother’s maiden name either because it was impossible to spell. Wasn’t sure what she wanted, just wanted ExHusbandsName -gone-, so she asked her lawyer for suggestions.
Lawyer was a little bemused, but wanted to be helpful, and inspired by a movie advertisement in the room, suggested the normal-sounding, easy to spell surname of the celebrity on the ad.
So the surname my friend has used for decades now is “Selleck” and she does get some funny looks when referring to her ex-husband whose given name, coincidentally, is Tom.
:-)
Gah, I wish I hadn’t come into the thread so late! I’m way too lazy to read all the comments, so please don’t kill me if this has already been brought to the table and the issue settled, but I once heard the reason men are given a harder time changing their names after marriage is because most men who change their names are trying to avoid paying child support, and because of this, even men who are legitimately changing their names get the shaft.
I have no idea where I heard this.
Plunky: IMHO, it is not, because it dilutes the whole idea of kinship/family/whatever for a more chaotic nonsystem.
What nonsense. It focusses the idea of kinship/family/whatever. If you like the family name you were given at birth, you’ll keep it. If you don’t like it, you’ll change it. Unlike the present chaotic system where it’s still often just assumed that a woman will adopt her husband’s family name however she feels about her own (and that a man will not change his family name regardless of what he feels about it) under the new default system, adults will have the family name they want to have.
roula - oops! Sorry about that. Yes, I got it the wrong way ’round. I have this occasional, very irritating, blind-spot where numbers are concerned…
Money hassles notwithstanding, I hope you enjoyed Scotland. I love the place - went to University there and lived in Edinburgh for three years afterwards. I’m sure it’s no consolation, but it’s a lot cheaper to live there than where I am now, in Bristol - which in some areas is even more expensive than London.
Plunky, yes the name is important, but creating a sense of family and kinship is also important for some people (as you yourself state, you just don’t like the way they do it). I would never, ever change my name, and my kids will have my name, but let’s say I felt really strongly about everyone in the family having the same name. No way in hell am I going to give up my own name only to be branded by someone else’s. I wouldn’t ask anyone else to do that if he didn’t want to, either. So what then? Well, we come up with our own name for our own family so we can all have something that belongs to us. Is that good or helpful? Yeah.
I don’t live in a vacuum, either, and my family of anti-feminist traditional reactionary conservative matriarchs would be appalled. So what? I don’t care. (BTW, that’s my mom’s side, my dad’s side would be fine with whatever.) Even though I’ll take endless grief for my decisions, it’s more than worth it for me. I don’t share their values, I hope my children don’t either, and I’m more than willing to pay the price. When they go at my daughters the way they’ve always gone at my sisters and me to let us know we’re less than because we’re girls, I’ll continue to fight every battle and feel extra good about it knowing they’re pissed about the name thing.
If I were a very young man getting married I would be open to change my last name to my wifes last name. These days, men wait until they are established in career or business before getting married. Changing a mans last name after his reputation is developed can be difficult at best.
Exceptions can always be the case and hopefully we can agree that men are generally older than the woman they are marrying. Moreover societal pressure has historically and still currently layed upon the man to provide. Hence the established male entering marriage is a diffuclut sell to ask him to change his name.
Isn’t it true that all we are in life is our reputation? My reasons for an established male NOT to change his name are practical and realistic. Most established women I know that enter marriage later in their lives keep their maiden names as well. Example: Dr. Rogers at work, Mrs. Monaghan at home. The children to have the fathers name as does the mother while at home!
You cannot force society to demand acceptance of something that simply does not make sense for many men. A masculine default has always been accepted. The reverse has not. A woman can wear mens clothes and nobody raises an eyebrow. If a man wears womans clothes he is automatically assumed to be gay or some variation of it.
Practicality and reputation trumps the mistaken and misguided accusation that men simply won’t bend or submit. When and if it makes sense we will!!!