From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/07/women-stop-changing-your-name-when-married
Your name is your identity. The reasons women give for changing their names after marrying don’t make much sense
Jill Filipovic
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 7 March 2013
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.
Not that I’m unsympathetic to the women out there who have difficult or unfortunate last names. My last name is “Filipovic.” People can’t spell it or pronounce it, which is a liability when your job includes writing articles under your difficult-to-spell last name, and occasionally doing television or radio hits where the host cannot figure out what to call you. It’s weird, and it’s “ethnic,” and it makes me way too easily Google-able. But Jill Filipovic is my name and my identity. Jill Smith is a different person.
Continue reading at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/07/women-stop-changing-your-name-when-married
