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BY michelle chihara
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CONFERENCING
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Wondering whether to keep your own name? Want to meet other women who did (or didn't)? Join in the conversation in the Women's Zone Conference.
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THE NAME GAME
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Just Call Me
Bernadette Noll changed her name too, but she's not going to bang it into anyone's head. Unless they call her "Mrs. Kenneth Anderson," that is.
In the Name of the Father
What does a girl called Spike have to say about changing her name? A hell of a lot.
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RELATED POD
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Women's Issues
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Meet the women, surf the pages, and join the conversation, in the X-Squared Pod.
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A rose by any other name... well, maybe. What does your name mean to you?
Used to be the M word was something we discussed only with people we'd never consider marrying (discussing it with HIM or HER was way too heavy). But now my friends are marrying, or at least considering marriage, in droves. Now what's heavy is deciding what to call yourself after the fact.
Traditions, like weddings, can make life simpler. They can tell you how it's done, because that's the way it's always been done. But for those of us who are used to questioning received wisdom, we're often left without answers.
I asked three women (plus one husband) to tell me how they made, or are making, their decision:
Margaret Gould Stewart, Tripod's Creative Director, married since February '95, changed her name.
Susan Roe and Josh Glenn, married since September '95, both kept their own names.
Alyssa Mills, 22, is informally engaged. She has not yet decided on a name.
Margaret Gould Stewart (Tripod's creative director) married David Stewart in February '95. She dropped her middle name (Ann) and replaced it with her maiden name (Gould):
"My reasons weren't feminist. I have a lot of issues about being a woman, but this isn't one of them. I do think it's wacky to have a family with different names. For the kids. It's not a serious psychological scar, but it's confusing for kids, when their parents have to choose which name they're going to have. And does that make one kid more my kid? I think it is a great thing for a family to share a name.
"When I decided to take David's last name, it was amazing to see the backlash from women who berated me for changing my name. Most were women who were five to ten years older than I am, and either divorced or unmarried. They were really incensed at the idea of me giving up my "identity." They said I would be losing myself. It was very accusatory. But, if you say that you're losing your identity if you change your name... well, it's frightening to me that people have their identity so wrapped up in one thing.
"The level of cynicism among the people who criticized me was extremely high, as if I shouldn't even consider that this were forever. They said, "What will you do if you get divorced? It'll be a pain in the neck." Feminism is supposed to be about having choices, not about one choice being better than another.
"David and I talked about this several months before we got engaged. He made a point of not pressuring me to change my name, though in the end I think he was happy, and really appreciates it. He knows it was a pain, but he thinks it's great for the family. I can't honestly say I know what would have happened if I hadn't changed my name, but I do think it changes the tone of the relationship.
"Now, the hyphenated last name... for me, that's just making too much of a point of it. It's too obviously political. Like — this person's going to be combative. I do think it is a political issue for some people, but it isn't for me, and that's the key. For me, it's a personal statement about family, not a political or feminist statement.
"And the hyphen is just ugly. What can I say, I'm a slave to aesthetics."
Josh Glenn and Susan Roe are 29 and 28, respectively. They've been married since September '95:
Josh: We hardly ever talked about it. We just assumed...
Susan: It didn't seem logical to me, to have to change my name. When you get married, some traditions seem to have logic, some don't. You have to find a way to consider which ones make sense to you.
J: Traditions have logic?
S: Like presents. Presents are logical.
J: The ring?
S: A symbol of the one unit.
J: We didn't do an engagement ring.
S: But changing your name...
J: Is it that it's not fair? Or that it's historically unjust? It makes sense to have the same last name for the same family.
S: I guess it just doesn't resonate for me.
J: People don't believe us when we tell them we're married sometimes. Like at customs, when we were going over to Mexico. They didn't understand the concept of being married and not having the same name. Joint accounts are a pain. In foreign countries, where people always change their names, we just pretend that we're not married.
S: We have friends who decided on a third name that had meaning to both of them.
J: Susan just thought Susan Glenn was ugly.
[Susan expresses dismay that a close friend, one of two twins who had fought hard to keep a family name after their mother divorced, opted to change her name.]
S: She wimped out.
J: A real feminist would never take her husband's name?
S: Not if she previously defined not taking it as an important political stance. For who she was, it was wimping out. It wasn't politically charged for me. I didn't do it to stand for anything. I just didn't want to change my name. It seemed like a completely arbitrary thing to do. It seemed weird, and gross, to change it.
I'm not sure why this one tradition doesn't make sense to me. But it doesn't. It doesn't have to be Roe and Glenn for the kids. I'm fine with them having the name Glenn, and then if they want to keep their names, that's fine. The name Roe doesn't mean that much to me as a name. It's an old Anglo-American name, they came over a long time ago. It's got no special historical significance. My middle name is my mother's birth mother's name. I could never drop that. My brothers' wives took our last name. I was offended, like, you're not a Roe. They didn't beat you up.
I guess we should divulge what my mother said.... My mother said, "You're not ready to get married if you're not ready to take his name."
She thought of it in terms of being a single unit, if you have the same last name. But I would be just as uncomfortable with a man changing his name.
J: It's a weird old hangover from older traditions... When you're skeptical of religion, and of the state, and you want to get married, how do you go through the trappings? How do you go through this hoary old tradition and keep your integrity? We Women's Zoneote our own vows.
S: And we figured out what we wanted the ceremony to be about: friendship, love, and commitment.
Alyssa Mills is 22 and is informally engaged to her boyfriend, Rich Kent, who is 23:
"I have always just assumed that I would keep my name. And Rich had always assumed that his wife would take his name. We found this out casually, when we were having a laughing discussion about getting married. As soon as we realized that the other person was being serious, it quickly became not so casual, and not a laughing conversation anymore.
"He had just never really imagined it any other way. He comes from a very conservative family, and he just thought his wife would take his name. When I asked him why, he couldn't even answer the question. He finally just said he'd never even thought about it, but that he'd also never thought about why murder was wrong...
"Rich thinks that everyone in the same family should have the same name. He thinks they're really important for the family, for a sense of community.
"So, I stated my case... I thought it was Women's Zoneong for a marriage to begin with one person's identity enveloping the other's. His reply was that if I thought that that was going to happen when I got married, then that was indicative of a bigger problem than whether or not to change my name. But my name is who I've always been. It's my name, it's my identity — and my name is a big part of my identity. You can't tell me that it's not.
"This is all besides the issues of professional identity, which are huge — I can't be Dr. Mills all the way along and then suddenly be Dr. Kent. Mills is who I am, it's who I've always been. I've spent most of my life working towards becoming Dr. Mills. It should be your own decision, whatever makes sense to you. It's not political. I just shudder every time I think of someone calling me Dr. Kent.
"His take was that marriage is a new phase of life, it's about a change... I haven't come to any real conclusions about it. We decided that it would be impossible for one of us to argue our position to the other successfully. I did ask him, if it came down to the week before the wedding, and we hadn't resolved this issue, what would he do? Would he break off the engagement? There were no answers.
"I've been thinking about it a lot since then, although we haven't really talked about it since. I have been talking to other people, though, and I get the sense that this kind of thing happens. Marriage is full of compromises, full of these hurdles that you have to get over, and if you can solve this problem together, then that's a good sign."
Meet the other players in The Name Game:
Just Call Me
Bernadette Noll changed her name too, but she's not going to bang it into anyone's head. Unless they call her "Mrs. Kenneth Anderson," that is.
In the Name of the Father
What does a girl called Spike have to say about changing her name? A hell of a lot.
Michelle Chihara is is Web editor and staff writer for the New Haven Advocate. She's quite attached to her name, but is not considering marriage anytime soon.
© 1997 Tripod, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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