What was that about submission again?
Not such good news. Sylvia Acosta on Facebook:
I just experienced a Handmaidens Tale moment at the DFW airport by Customs and Border Protection. I was traveling back from Rome and stopped by US customs. I was asked if Sybonae was my daughter and I said yes. Then they asked why if she was my daughter I didn’t have the same last name. I told them I had already established my career and earned my doctorate with my last name Acosta so I had decided not to change it. That is why we had different names. Then the customs office said, well maybe you should have taken your husbands last names so you could prove you were her mom. I told him I had a lot of proof she was my daughter without having had his last name. He then took me to another room where they proceeded to interrogate me and my daughter to prove I was her parent. I had to reexplain why we didn’t share last names and again one said well maybe you should consider changing your name to reflect that you are her mother. I then proceeded to tell them that they were perpetuating an institutionalized misogynistic system which required that a woman take her husbands name and after that and a whole lot more about what I thought about what they had said to me that they let us go. I am furious.
It’s had 13,584 shares as of this moment.
Seriously. Women have been keeping their last names for at least 3 generations. Many of the professional women I know kept their last names; often their degrees were in those names, their publications were in those names, and their entire pre-marriage career was in those names. It is much easier to prove you are the mother of your daughter with a different last name than to go through all the nonsense about proving you are the graduate, the author, etc, with different last names.
Amazing attitude in 2018
I asked my newly married wife (in 1981) whether she would change her name. She decided to be a ‘Mrs”, it was entirely her choice. Btw whatever happened to ‘Ms’?
My jaw is dragging on the floor right now. Are these people Neanderthals? Actually, that’s a bit mean to Neanderthals. I suspect they cared much less about that sort of trivia.
Rob
Yes, I wonder if Neanderthals had any concept of marriage and all its complications. Greco-Roman writers claimed that some ‘barbarian’ tribes had no concept of marriage.
Mrs latsot changed her name to Smith when we got married, but kept her maiden (fucking hell, ‘maiden’) name at work.
I have no idea why she changed it at all. It is hardly the case that ownership of her was transferred to me from her already dead father when we were photographed signing the thing you have to sign so what’s that all about?
Her family is a lot better than mine. I’d rather be adopted into it than she into mine.
Ik think I prefer the system in Belgium. When people marry, they keep their own name.
I could see this happening to my wife too. We married in Spain, where women don’t change their names (and if they get married in another country and decide to change their names, that brings on a host of legal headaches). Not that I would’ve asked her to change it anyway; that always seemed like a stupid custom to me (bad enough that both our kids have my surname). Anyway, it never happened, and the kids are older now, but still it’s an annoyance when people assume we have the same surname.
Which is exactly why I did change my name. I adopted my husband’s family because they actually wanted me and treated me like a fully functional human being and member of the family.
I do not regard my name change as a transfer of ownership, since my father never owned me, either, no matter how hard my parents tried to assert ownership rights.
My last name is rare; the small number of people with it are all related. Due to my mother’s remarriage and my estrangement from my father, I grew up with almost no contact with anyone who shared my last name. My (now ex-) wife, in contrast, grew up in a more “standard” family where everyone shared a last name. Both she and I kept our names when we married.
When we had children, they were given my last name. I was then in the unfamiliar position of sharing a last name with other people in family, while my wife was in the (for her) unfamiliar position of having a last name different from everyone else in the family; we had swapped our childhood situations.
Mrs latsot is as capable, independent and impressive a person as you’ll ever meet. She’s a partner in a successful law firm and the one the other partners go to when they fuck up or feel the need to complain about each other.
When my parents send her birthday cards and so on, they address them to Mrs Rob Smith. She doesn’t even get to keep her first name, apparently. As far as they’re concerned, ownership was fully transferred to me at some point. I don’t remember signing a disclaimer or anything. Am I responsible if she embezzles a widow’s pension or something?
On a vaguely related note they always draw a wavy line under the name of our village on the envelope. Do they think the Royal Mail deliberately misdeliver mail that doesn’t have the wavy line? Does wavy-line mail go into a priority queue? Is this a secret they and they alone know?
@latsot I hear you on that. I never changed my name, much to my in-laws distress, and they still insist on addressing letters as Mr and Mrs John Smith (note, not my husbands real name :-) ). Drives me crazy. I was at a family wedding earlier this year and the table settings had my husbands surname not mine and I grumbled about it to my husband. Unfortunately, my M-I-L overheard and proceeded to upbraid me that it didn’t matter and why was I making such a fuss? I wasn’t, but I feel justified in a quiet complaint to my spouse since it’s not like they don’t know what my name is. They knew me for nearly ten years before we got married. But somehow I’m the asshole?
@RJW No idea in general why more people don’t use Ms but in my case, I just hate the sound. But lucky me, one of the side benefits of a PhD is calling yourself Dr. Completely genderless. My husband is often assumed to be Dr Claire of course, which he actually enjoys because then he gets to say “actually that’s my wife” and then laugh at the facial expressions.
My husband was totally amused when we got our first Christmas card from my dad after I graduated. He addressed it to Mr. and Dr. He still does that (he’s very proud, and so is my husband, who always refers to me as Dr. when talking to others about me).
When I was a kid, I had a cousin that had a doctorate, and was married to a man with a doctorate. My mother, the least feminist person I know, was outraged that she always wrote their names as Dr. and Mrs. “John Smith” (Yes, she used his first name, as well). My unfeminist, anti-feminist mother insisted on addressing their card to the Drs. “Smith”. My mother didn’t like the Mr. and Dr. – she thought it was clunky. So why not Dr. and Mr.? By what rule is it required that he be first? My mother would not have been able to put any woman in the address in front of her husband, no matter how much she insisted that women be given their earned title.
Claire @ 11
“I just hate the sound” that might be a clue, and the idea that it is (was) an imposition or that ‘Ms’ was just another form of “Miss”. It was certainly the trend at university in the 70s. I live in a small country town which is probably not at the leading edge of social change, however I’ve noticed that titles, apart from academic ones, seem to be disappearing.
The problem in English-speaking countries is that anyone who uses the title “Doctor” is expected to be a medico.