Hullabaloo

Friday, March 08, 2013

 
Name change challenge

by digby

This piece by Jill Filipovic asking why women still change their names when they get married is long overdue:

Excuse me while I play the cranky feminist for a minute, but I'm disheartened every time I sign into Facebook and see a list of female names I don't recognize. You got married, congratulations! But why, in 2013, does getting married mean giving up the most basic marker of your identity? And if family unity is so important, why don't men ever change their names?

On one level, I get it: people are really hard on married women who don't change their names. Ten percent of the American public still thinks that keeping your name means you aren't dedicated to your marriage. And a full 50% of Americans think you should be legally required to take your husband's name. Somewhere upwards of 90% of women do change their names when they get married. I understand, given the social judgment of a sexist culture, why some women would decide that a name change is the path of least resistance.

But that's not what you usually hear. Instead, the defense of the name change is something like, "We want our family to share a name" or "His last name was better" or "My last name was just my dad's anyway" – all reasons that make no sense. If your last name is really your dad's, then no one, including your dad, has a last name that's actually theirs.

It may be the case that in your marriage, he did have a better last name. But if that's really a gender-neutral reason for a name change, you'd think that men with unfortunate last names would change theirs as often as women do. Given that men almost never change their names upon marriage, either there's something weird going on where it just so happens that women got all of the bad last names, or "I changed my name because his is better" is just a convenient and ultimately unconvincing excuse.

T%he one I always used to hear was that it's important for children for their mothers and fathers to have the same name they do. Obviously, in this age of divorce and multiple families that's no longer operative. But then I never understood this. I'm a lot older than Filipovic and but it never occurred to me to change my name when I got married and my husband and I never even discussed it. He understood it the same way I did: it's weird. It just seems like an anachronistic ritual, strangely unmodern. Why would you change the name you were born with to someone else's name? If you don't like your name, why not change it one you choose, like actors do? The whole thing has always struck me as a little bit medieval.

Of course, I don't really care what anyone does in these matters. If a woman wants to change her name to her husband's that's certainly her right and it's none of my business why she does it. These are very personal decisions. But I confess that it's always seemed odd to me, especially now. Maybe Facebook will be the change agent.

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digby 3/08/2013 12:30:00 PM