Appellation

Since I was a little girl, when many females of the species are concerned with understanding and internalizing their predicted roles in life, I've been pretty darn certain that when I got married, I would take my husband's last name. I assume this understanding was the result of a conversation with my Mom about why Grandma and Grandpa J, who were her mommy and daddy, had a different name from her. I assume that she told me that when she married Dad, his last name became her last name. And I never questioned this.

In the intervening years I've seen why this whole name changing business should be fraught with peril, despite not really having the example of hyphenated or staunchly keeping-her-own-name-thank-you-very-much role models as a wee thing. I do know that this "women take their husband's name" understanding must have happened very young, since it was already breaking down by the time my Aunt married (I was, what, 7 or 8?) and she kept her own last name for business and that didn't seem to shock me. I was more stunned that I might not get baby cousins out of the deal, which is an insight into how I figured the life cycle goes.

I always thought my Mom's name was pretty cool, cause it is. I mean, her initials are HRH, which I would have monogrammed on all my big fluffy towels and bathrobes if I were her. I remember her explaining that it was our family name and that made it important to her. It was something that she shared with her husband and her children. We spent so much time with my maternal grandparents I never questioned the strength of her relationship with her own parents and sister, and rightly so.

But now on the other side of it, as an affianced woman, I'm examining the custom and what it actually means. I've never questioned the rightness of taking my husband's name in my particular case but I can definitely understand why it is so complicated for lots of other women.

First, there's the career thing. As for my Aunt, if you're established in the field as Ms. K H and then you suddenly disappear and Mrs. K G pops up instead, that can hurt you in terms of clients referring you, or people trying to follow your academic work. It's not like in the olden days when people would advertise their marriages to their local community so everyone could keep track. In some sense, you have to start over as a new person and what you did before you were married doesn't count. (I guess even when people were routinely putting out those marriage notices, what a woman did before marriage was largely irrelevant, as the entire goal of being a woman was to get married and manage a household.) Harsh. This reasoning may seem very practical, and I think more men are accepting of this as a genuine "excuse" not to change because they sympathize with the "it's for my career" idea. However, I think it hits on the idea that a woman can have an identity in addition to her role as wife.

Secondly, there's the family thing. I have a strong relationship with my family and that won't change because of the name I carry. But the name I have now is the name my parents, specifically my father, gave me. I prize it because it's unusual and ethnic and it ties me to my ancestors like nothing else I have. I don't want to seem ungrateful to that heritage, and I would hate to see society change to the point where it would be a slight to my parents if I chose Brett's name over theirs for our new family.

Thirdly, there's the cultural and historical implications of taking your husband's name. I like thinking of it as joining his tribe, becoming one of his people, but there's been some times in history and places in the world where it only signifies becoming the property of his family group. You lose the protection of your family, and the right to being part of the future of that family. Maybe for a 16 year old girl in medieval France who is a little bit sick of her folks anyway this is just another stage of life, like going to college and finding a new identity there, but for plenty of modern American women it's very valid to be unsettled by that sort of thing. I know I'm not going to be paraded from my village and abandoned by my family to another clan who I barely know. It won't even be like it was in my Grandmother's day where a woman stopped being Miss Kate H, and became instead Mrs. Brett G, losing everything that signified her as an individual to an outside observer. Thank goodness. But in taking Brett's name, I will be assuming a new, unfamiliar identity. It's going to take time to get comfortable with that.

For me, thinking about all this cultural baggage makes taking Brett's name an act of love, rather than rote adherence to social custom. I know and understand why it sends some women into fits to even be called Mrs. G on junk mail, when they've worked so hard to be Ms. H. or when they feel it's got more to do with being his family's newest acquisition than making a new family of their own. I don't happen to share these feelings, and I do not think they are equally valid across space and time, but I do understand them. To know that there is debate about the usefulness and relevance of patrilineal naming makes my decision to become Kate G more meaningful, I think, because it's my choice rather than something that just happens to me because I'm a woman getting married.

Yes, it makes me want to cry and cry to give up my H. Yes, I love it and what it means to me. There's a road in the backwoods of Michigan with my name on it. I've never met anyone with my name I wasn't directly related to. I love that. Even more though, I love Brett, I love his family, I want to be one of his people and I want our children to have my name too. That doesn't mean that the kids won't know how important that H is to me and to their family history (and their grandmother's maiden J for that matter).

I won't stop being who I am because my last name changes, but I can't deny that names are serious business and I would never dream of telling another person how to handle losing/ giving up the way they've thought of themselves for the last 25 years of their life.