Because it is my name
Sep. 5th, 2011 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupI dislike the practice of women changing their last name upon marriage, but only in the aggregate. In any individual case, I can see the merits: yes, it is lovely for both of you to have the same last name, and practical to have the same last name as your children. Changing both your names to something new would be inefficient*, and of course your name is the less interesting/harder to spell/more associated with an asshole father/would cause no end of problems with your in laws/has less professional significance. The fact that some of these reasons are near-opposites, and that somehow men never have abusive fathers they want to distance themselves from, indicates to me that in the aggregate what we're seeing is a society that devalues women's names relative to men's, but in any individual case, it's an individual case.
I am not so sanguine about cases in which the woman, and only the woman, hyphenates her last name upon marriage. Hyphenating everyone's name solves the symbolic problem wonderfully, albeit at the cost of a lot of practical problems**. But using the man's name alone for him and the kids, and tagging it onto the end of her name says to me "we recognize that her losing the name she's had since birth would have had unacceptable practical costs, but we still wanted to mark her as his property."
I'm sure there are many wonderful people who nonetheless made that decision, and I'm not calling them evil or misogynistic, but I am saying I don't see a work around for how problematic the symbolism is.
*Although I find it hypocritical to say the symbolism of having the same name is important, but the symbolism of one person bearing 100% of the burden of that is not.
**I may just be bitter that my last name (which I got from my dad) is too long to ever consider hyphenating. Many people's hyphenated names are shorter than my non-hyphenated name.
I am not so sanguine about cases in which the woman, and only the woman, hyphenates her last name upon marriage. Hyphenating everyone's name solves the symbolic problem wonderfully, albeit at the cost of a lot of practical problems**. But using the man's name alone for him and the kids, and tagging it onto the end of her name says to me "we recognize that her losing the name she's had since birth would have had unacceptable practical costs, but we still wanted to mark her as his property."
I'm sure there are many wonderful people who nonetheless made that decision, and I'm not calling them evil or misogynistic, but I am saying I don't see a work around for how problematic the symbolism is.
*Although I find it hypocritical to say the symbolism of having the same name is important, but the symbolism of one person bearing 100% of the burden of that is not.
**I may just be bitter that my last name (which I got from my dad) is too long to ever consider hyphenating. Many people's hyphenated names are shorter than my non-hyphenated name.
