The right to be named
In Afghanistan, family members often force women to keep their name a secret from people outside the family, even doctors. Using a woman’s name in public is frowned upon and can be considered an insult. Many Afghan men are reluctant to say the names of their sisters, wives or mothers in public. Women are generally only referred to as the mother, daughter or sister of the eldest male in their family, and Afghan law dictates that only the father’s name should be recorded on a birth certificate.
Of course that’s not completely strange to us in the so much more progressive part of the world. Not many decades ago it was pretty normal to refer to a woman as Mrs Charles Dudeguy and leave it at that. It wasn’t taboo to know her first name, and informally it was ok to call her Jane Dudeguy, but it was quite possible to read a news story (for instance) that referred to a woman solely as Mrs Man’s Name.
But it’s even worse in Afghanistan. It’s as if societies compete to see which ones can most completely obliterate and conceal women. Here we’ve given up on the niqabs and no names approach, and instead we replace women with men who say they are women – they do it much better. (Except for the sex part. Since that’s by far the most important use for women, that’s a bit of a problem, but technology will probably come up with a fix soon.)
But some Afghan women are now campaigning to use their names freely, with the slogan “Where Is My Name?” The campaign began three years ago when Laleh Osmany realised she was fed up with women being denied what she thought was a “basic right”.
Well, yes, because if you’re only ever referred to as Man’s Possession you begin to wonder if you’re just an object, like a kettle.
My mother was as anti-feminist as they come, but she bristled if someone referred to her as Mrs. MyDad. She didn’t mind the Mrs, but she expected her own name to be there. She used to get angry at a cousin of mine who was a PhD married to a PhD who always sent things with return address as Dr. and Mrs X. My antifeminist mother would always insist that Christmas cards to my cousin went to Dr. and Dr. X or to the Drs. X. It seems little enough to ask. Why bother giving a woman a name if you won’t use it?
I had an elderly relative that always wrote “her” name as “Mrs. Husband’s Name”. When writing her name, I figured she’d want me to write it that way, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I wanted to be polite, but that was just too bizarre.
(Along those lines I once read a story about a man whose wife became super Christian so she started wearing a head covering to show her submission to him, which he hated. He also thought it was ironic that she was showing her submission by doing something he didn’t want her to do.)
Yep, I remember as a child seeing a letter from a woman to my mother about some community thing – i.e. not a personal friend – signed Mrs ManName Dude, and staring at it for a long time thinking how odd. Not feminist thoughts, just…odd. Mrs leads one to expect some presence of the female person but then there’s ManName instead.
I recall learning (way back when) that the proper way to address a married woman is either “Mary Smith” or “Mrs John Smith”; “Mrs Mary Smith” was incorrect. Obviously this form has changed, but it used to be the standard. “Mrs John Smith” is of course “the woman belonging to John Smith”.
I learned that too, now you mention it.
Isn’t it odd that erasure of women exactly coincides with erasure of the female sex. Were all of those Erased Menstruators asked if they identify as the Erased?
Your anecdotes remind me of a Henry Lawson short, Remailed, which details the bygone custom of remailing newspapers and similar publications by widely separated mates. It’s a good example of his writing style, having a blend of wistfulness and gentle humour, and it contains a good example of that custom:
“The wife of”.
I learned as a child and due to my parents’ divorce, that a married woman should be addressed as Mrs. , but once divorced it was Mrs. . So, before my mother was married, she was herself. After they were married, she was just his wife. After she was divorced, she was half herself and half the mistake neither she nor anyone else could forget.
Seems awfully cruel, that. But at least she had a name, even it if wasn’t entirely hers.
@Holms #6
All three doing well? Aren’t there four of them?
That phrase refers to the mother and twins.
On the Australian frontier in the great Age of Squatting of the 1840s, (the above-mentioned Henry Lawson having been born in 1867) there was much slaughter of Aborigines who resisted the settlers. At the same time, there was an imbalance of the sexes among the settlers rising as high as 3 males to 1 female.
It was in practice no crime in colonial Australia for a white settler to shoot an Aborigine, though any black man who killed or injured a white settler soon had a hunting party out after him. The original ‘full-blood’ Tasmanian population was by such a process totally exterminated, and survives today in people whose ancestry is mainly non-Aboriginal.
But there was one refuge for Aboriginal women. They could always become the mistress, lay, concubine, property; call her what you will, of a white settler or farm hand. She would be protected also against white-settler rapists and ‘gin-rooters’ as the property of the squatter or farm hand, and it became a trend for a squatter to have one wife and family in the main house, and another consisting of a black ‘gin’ and her kids in a humpy further away, somewhere between the main house and the ‘blacks camp’. (The settler’s wife, burdened herself with domestic chores and kids, had reason to turn a blind eye.) The children of such Aboriginal women were said to have had ‘a touch of the tar-brush’; tar being widely used as a patch-up for sheep accidentally cut during shearing, or purposefully cut (castrated, tali-docked etc) and as an all-purpose sealant.
The result today is that throughout southern Australia, all people identifying as Aborigines have non-Aboriginals in their ancestral mix somewhere. The only exceptions are in the extreme tropics of the far North, where white settlers did not incline to settle, because of the heat, humidity, monsoons, biting and venomous arthropods and snakes, malaria, crocodiles, and other such tropical phenomena.
Some years ago I met the famous Aboriginal film star David Gulpilil, who made a point of telling me with some obvious pride that he was a ‘full-blood’. As it happens, I read somewhere that he got married to a white woman: very much the reverse of the normal practice, and totally unheard of in polite 19thC colonial society, and also well into the 20th C.
The part-Aboriginality of practically all of the modern Aboriginal population can only be explained by young ‘full blood’ men being removed (shot out) from the colonial breeding population, and their places taken by young white self-styled ‘gin-rooters’ who did not want to know about any kids they fathered. The result was generations of young part-Aboriginal men growing up without anyone to identify as their biological fathers, from whom to receive instruction in ancestral lore and skills; which I think has had consequences: none which I think many would incline to call good.
Mrs latsot changed her name when we married (except at work, where she is still known as Oldname (and Miss Oldname* to clients). I have no idea why she did this and she’s never been able to satisfactorily explain. I was against the idea, but it’s her name and none of my business and that’s what she did.
It still surprises me two decades later. She’s not usually the sort of person to go along with tradition for no good reason, especially when it’s an offensive tradition.
* That makes it sound like she’s a dominatrix. She’s a lawyer who does a lot of mental health work and felt changing her name might be confusing to some.
I read an article by Evelyn Waugh – some kind of society gossip where he referred to someone as Mrs Bryan Guinness. That seemed so odd referring to a woman much better known as Diana Mitford and later as Diana Moseley, whereas Bryan Guinness would only be known now as once having been married to her.
latsot, I changed my name when I married, and get a lot of grief for that, but I did have reasons. I had no desire to continue carrying around the name of the man who raped me (not my father – my brother). Also, I felt like I was electing to join my husband’s family. They clearly wanted and cherished me, and the family carrying my old name did not.
So there are reasons other than “belonging to” that a woman might take a man’s name. We did discuss making up my own name, but I elected to become a member of his family, not his property.