Names Again
Norm Geras has taken up the discussion of women and names. (And by the way, speaking of Norm, there was a conference to honour his career at Manchester a few days ago. Chris Bertram of Twisty Sticks gave a paper there on Marx and Engels reading Rousseau, Ian Kershaw gave one on the singularity of the Holocaust. I was not there, I was over here, several miles away, turning pale with envy.) You’ll see that he doesn’t entirely agree with JerryS.
..what’s always struck me as the most difficult issue is not – as gets pointed out pretty quickly – that by keeping her own name a woman is still thereby accepting to be known by the name of another man: in this case her father’s. That is unavoidable.
The background to that is that Manchester City beat Manchester United last weekend.
No it’s not, I’m just being silly. As usual. Or rather more than usual. It’s this book, you see. I work on it for awhile and end up feeling light-headed – all that snickering. Anyway, Norm makes a good point about this business of a woman’s keeping her own name after marriage but then giving all the children the father’s name.
But I find the option perplexing. For what it seems to initiate by the woman’s retention of her own name – that is, putting men and women on an equal footing in this domain – it effectively undercuts by the way the child is named.
Just so. I suppose that’s one of the many bits of radicalism that was just allowed to drift away over the years. But many of those bits of radicalism were worth hanging onto and trying to implement, I’ve always thought and still think. And that’s one of them.
But Norm just misses the point with:
“That is unavoidable. If she went back to her mother’s original name, it would simply land her with the name of her maternal grandfather.”
You don’t go back to your mother’s original name. You simply choose a new name. That isn’t actually difficult (just need to change a few pieces of paper, etc).
Hmm. It’s not as easy as all that though. There’s the risk of losing people who don’t know you’ve done it, for example. People you knew when you were fifteen and have lost track of. (Which is also true of changing name on marriage.) There are practical reasons not to change one’s last name, surely.
“People you knew when you were fifteen and have lost track of.”
But surely this is the case with every woman who changes her name when she gets married!
Am I missing something here?
“But surely this is the case with every woman who changes her name when she gets married!”
I know! But I’m not saying that women should change their names when they get married, I’m saying they shouldn’t!
“Am I missing something here?”
Could be. Did you overlook a “not” somewhere?
“But I’m not saying that women should change their names when they get married”
Yes, I know. But if 95% of married women manage their name change, then surely, given the principle we’re discussing, any problems with changing a name shouldn’t be sufficient to stop women generally doing it, if it means that they thereby, at least in part, subvert the whole patriarchal lineage thing.
Oh, I see.
Well, maybe. But I tend to take the view Norm expressed, which is simply that one has to start somewhere. One drawback to your plan is that it would still be an asymmetrical task for women – unless you’re suggesting that men should change their names too. Hey that’s a thought. How about women keep their names, because that’s more convenient, and men change theirs, because it isn’t. Then in a generation or two patriarchal lineage will be subverted and everyone can be Mr or Ms Tinkerbell.
I’ve always thought it wasn’t so harmful to let the men pass their names on to their children. They have so little to do with the production of them, overall, that it’s sort of a consolation prize, you know? When I said before that it was equality, what I meant was that at least boys and girls are treated the same way in this case. But it really bothers me that women give up their lifelong names at marriage. As one friend of mine put it, speaking of her ex-husband, “Before we were married, he introduced me as ‘Cindy’. Afterwards he introduced me as ‘his wife'”. Ew.
Yeah, ew.
I’ve read a few comments on other threads around blogoville, and seen some even weirder stuff. Men ranting about what they will or will not ‘let’ their wives do, and such. Stone age stuff. Ew more times than I can type it.
I “let” my girlfriend do things in the same way I “let” gravity pull things to earth and the way I “let” the sun shine ;-).
Yeah. Like, let it be, man.