4 ms·

My wife decided not to take my name, and I was cool with that (there were very practical reasons to avoid a name change). I have a male friend who took his wif

by brabel 6y ago

My wife decided not to take my name, and I was cool with that (there were very practical reasons to avoid a name change). I have a male friend who took his wife's last name, actually (his reason was that his surname is basically the most common in the country, which made his full name highly non-unique)! I never understood why modern women still tend to change their name. It's definitely not something anyone expects, in my experience at least.

DoreenMichele 6y ago
I never understood why modern women still tend to change their name. It's definitely not something anyone expects, in my experience at least. I took my husband's name largely because it was a cheap, easy and very private means to stop having the same last name as someone who molested and raped me. I kept my married name when I divorced on the socially acceptable reason that it's the same name as my children. It's a valid reason, but the firmer reason was that my ex's last name is less objectionable than my rapist's last name as a moniker for myself. Should I ever remarry, I am highly likely to again take my new husband's last name to try one last time to wash off the shit of my past. Child molestation or other abuse by relatives is sadly all too common. I doubt anyone has formally studied it, but I would be shocked if it turned out I was the only woman who chose to change my last name for that kind of reason. If we want real equality, we will also need to stamp out the gendered trends in sexual assault. It is typically a male assaulting a female and this can have lifelong negative impact when she is assaulted at a young age.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  It’s awful that this happened to you, and I appreciate you providing your insight as to why you personally decided to go through with it. However, I’m still curious why most other women do so–those who have no reason to separate themselves from their family.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    It's socially acceptable. It's tradition/habit. It makes it easier to identify your new family unit of you, your spouse and children. If we start hyphenating all last names, it won't be too many generations before all have last names of three pages long. I don't know a nice, neat simple solution for this issue. There are some good points to "me, my spouse and kids all have a family name together and it's reasonably short." We also tend to trace inheritance via the father's family line. Some women trade their middle name for the maiden name and take their husband's last name as a solution, like Hillary Rodham Clinton. That seems to be a mostly upper class tradition for women with more of a public life where they have a real need to have some kind of continuity with their past identity in their own right. Trying to bring women out of the shadows of the very private lives as only full-time wives and moms and into the public sphere -- which is de facto the trend here as women live longer, have fewer kids and need to occupy themselves somehow other than just cooking and cleaning -- is complicated. When I don't completely hate my life and wish I had never been born, I occasionally think it's a great experiment in how to resolve some of these questions. There are no easy or simple answers for how to move an entire world rapidly and well from one system to another, which is more or less what the entire world is in the process of doing. How we used to handle it made logical sense for the social fabric of that era. And our social fabric is changing and what worked at one time is now seen as all wrong and bad and I worry that we are throwing the baby out of with the bathwater here. I guess literally, because trying to give women some kind of rights and just handing them a male model is clearly shafting mothers and children. And I think we need to do better than that. I think we urgently need to do better than that.

by brabel 6y ago

DoreenMichele 6y ago

I never understood why modern women still tend to change their name. It's definitely not something anyone expects, in my experience at least. I took my husband's name largely because it was a cheap, easy and very private means to stop having the same last name as someone who molested and raped me. I kept my married name when I divorced on the socially acceptable reason that it's the same name as my children. It's a valid reason, but the firmer reason was that my ex's last name is less objectionable than my rapist's last name as a moniker for myself. Should I ever remarry, I am highly likely to again take my new husband's last name to try one last time to wash off the shit of my past. Child molestation or other abuse by relatives is sadly all too common. I doubt anyone has formally studied it, but I would be shocked if it turned out I was the only woman who chose to change my last name for that kind of reason. If we want real equality, we will also need to stamp out the gendered trends in sexual assault. It is typically a male assaulting a female and this can have lifelong negative impact when she is assaulted at a young age.

saagarjha 6y ago
It’s awful that this happened to you, and I appreciate you providing your insight as to why you personally decided to go through with it. However, I’m still curious why most other women do so–those who have no reason to separate themselves from their family.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  It's socially acceptable. It's tradition/habit. It makes it easier to identify your new family unit of you, your spouse and children. If we start hyphenating all last names, it won't be too many generations before all have last names of three pages long. I don't know a nice, neat simple solution for this issue. There are some good points to "me, my spouse and kids all have a family name together and it's reasonably short." We also tend to trace inheritance via the father's family line. Some women trade their middle name for the maiden name and take their husband's last name as a solution, like Hillary Rodham Clinton. That seems to be a mostly upper class tradition for women with more of a public life where they have a real need to have some kind of continuity with their past identity in their own right. Trying to bring women out of the shadows of the very private lives as only full-time wives and moms and into the public sphere -- which is de facto the trend here as women live longer, have fewer kids and need to occupy themselves somehow other than just cooking and cleaning -- is complicated. When I don't completely hate my life and wish I had never been born, I occasionally think it's a great experiment in how to resolve some of these questions. There are no easy or simple answers for how to move an entire world rapidly and well from one system to another, which is more or less what the entire world is in the process of doing. How we used to handle it made logical sense for the social fabric of that era. And our social fabric is changing and what worked at one time is now seen as all wrong and bad and I worry that we are throwing the baby out of with the bathwater here. I guess literally, because trying to give women some kind of rights and just handing them a male model is clearly shafting mothers and children. And I think we need to do better than that. I think we urgently need to do better than that.