As a woman with very little interest in getting married, I have long struggled to understand why it's so important for heterosexual women to adopt a name that isn't theirs. Even more, it troubles me that conversations on this tradition of taking a man's name after marriage are now difficult to have without defensiveness being mounted from either side.
Prompt a conversation on the topic, and more often than not you'll be met with angered cries that not only does the discussion equate to criticism, but that there can be nothing less feminist that criticising women's "choices". Comment threads under articles about marriage and names tend to be filled with outraged people eager to explain why their choice was different, more feminist, less subject to social conditioning. I wasn't forced to, someone might argue. It was my choice - and isn't feminism about choice?
If a simple matter of choice was really at the crux of why many more women than men adopt their partners' surname on marriage, we would see it being reciprocated. We would hear men offering multiple reasons about how they were eager to let go of their last name: the oft-cited "difficult to spell and/or pronounce" surname, for example, or the fractured relationship with one's father. As we only tend to hear these justifications offered by women, we are left with two possible explanations for why this might be happening. Either it is only women who end up saddled with hard-to-pronounce names and terrible fathers (unlikely) or these are instead excuses offered to soften the blow of what seems in other respects to be an intellectually unsound choice.
Pose this to anyone defending the practice and they might say, "Well, what difference does it make? You have your father's name anyway, so it's one or the other."
This is certainly true for most women, but it's also true for most men. The difference for men is they are born with their father's name, but given the privilege and luxury of owning that name for themselves. No one suggests they should take the name of someone else (or that of someone else's father), because we are culturally conditioned to see men as entitled to claim for themselves the name and all it represents. They may be one in a long line of many, but they also get to be front and centre in the families they assemble beneath that name.
Women, on the other hand, are treated as if the names we have are on temporary loan, given to us to use until another man bestows on us the one that will become our new and true identity.
Wanting to discuss these ideas shouldn't be seen as an attack on the women who've taken their partners names. As Annie Brown wrote recently of her own decision to take her husband's name, sometimes you need to pick your battles and cut people some slack in an imperfect world that often disappoints us.
But in many feminist circles, it's become fashionable to respond to critiques of systems that oppress women by invoking the argument of "choice" as a feminist act. To wit, that any choice undertaken by a woman is automatically rendered feminist merely because of her ability to make it.
According to this notion, we remove our body hair not because decades of shame both overt and subtle have made us believe it's disgusting, but because we just like it better that way. We wear uncomfortable clothes and makeup not because we've been encouraged to believe our natural selves aren't good enough, but because they simply make us feel good. We engage in work that reflects sexist values not because patriarchy limits the options in which we can make competitive wages but just because we want to.
And it's okay, because isn't feminism about choice?
Well, no. Feminism is about the liberation of everyone - especially women - from the oppression of patriarchy. Choice is a meaningful part of this project, but not when it's solely about negotiating illusory power in a flawed system.
Those of us who attempt to even gently query the mechanisms that underpin these choices are often admonished for failure to respect the diversity of women's experiences. But examining the ways in which "choice" is packaged and sold to women under the guise of empowerment isn't the same thing as blanket criticism.
In the case of marriage, there is historical impetus for the act of sacrificing your birth name to take up that of your husband's. That history is the transfer of property from one man to another - which included land, titles, and, yes, daughters. Continuing this tradition has implications for feminism that shouldn't be swept under the carpet because we've now decided it's a simple matter of choice.
Wanting to have this conversation and to discuss the possibility that it is cultural coaching and not "free will" that leads us to embrace these choices shouldn't be parsed as an 'attack on women'. Deeply held societal messages are delivered every bit as effectively as the most successful marketing campaigns, and it's absurd for any of us to pretend that this particular form of "aspirational life goals" advertising doesn't work on us.
Simply put, no choice is made in a vacuum, and wanting to interrogate why we choose the things we do is a sign of intellectual progress, not fascism.
Nor should any flimsy notion of "choice" prevent us from exploring ideas and practices that influence and shape our place in that world. Ultimately, we can still decide to value the choices we've made - but we should never be wed to the idea they are infallible.
Navigating the path that will best service your survival within a system that wants to undermine and diminish you may be an effective way to secure some kind of power, but it isn't liberation - no matter what name you choose to put on it.
9 comments
New User? Sign up