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By now I’m sure that you can tell that feminist issues are a very big deal for me. It even took a bit of coaxing from my parents for me to walk down the aisle with my dad; I did it for him, because it was important to him, but I don’t like the idea of being passed off from one man’s hands to another. Yet one thing about my decisions related to my married life really stands out: I took my husband’s name.
I’ll admit it rankled a little, just the idea that I erase a part of myself in order to take on a very public part of my husband, while he makes no equivalent exchange. I know it’s the tradition for women to use their maiden name as their middle name. But either way a part of me is erased, and anyway “Angela Kriebel Shambeda” is a little unwieldy.
Why didn’t I do something more creative, find a way around the common practice? Honestly, because it was just easier to take my husband’s name. I’m a little ashamed of myself for taking the easiest route, for capitulating to a practice with which I have problems just to make things simpler for myself. But that points out still how patriarchal our society is in some places, that it was easier for me to change my name on all legal, medical, and other forms, then to get to keep my own name.
I thought about hyphenation, but only for a moment. As I said, Kriebel and Shambeda are each enough of a mouthful on their own without putting them together. I could have just stayed Angela Kriebel, but then what about our children? We’re back to the hyphenation problem. I thought about giving any boys Jon’s name and any girl’s mine (or doing the reverse, just to really thumb my nose at gender-based conventions), but there’s not really any precedent I’m aware of for that. I wasn’t sure that it would be accepted or even legal.
It still bugs me a bit that I’m just doing what’s easier instead of trying to make a stand for something that I really believe in. It’s not that I don’t want to join Jon’s family; I think they’re awesome. I just don’t like the idea of sort of legally casting off my own. It kind of goes back to the whole, getting handed off from one man to the other idea from the walking down the aisle issue.
What I really wanted to do, or at least thought would be a cool idea, is if when a couple gets married, they choose a new last name for themselves. I know, I know, it would be a legal nightmare, not to imagine what it might do to genealogy research (but we could still keep our “family name” as extra identification on some forms, like we have to do with our mother’s maiden name sometimes, so it wouldn’t disappear from record). I thought that would be a fair way to go about it, but I know I haven’t really thought it through and that it would probably just cause a lot of practical problems.
I’m not properly upset to have taken my husband’s name; I did it, after all. I haven’t changed my name on Facebook, which may seem silly but given the popularity of Facebook these days maybe it is saying something. I just sometimes think how neat it would be if there was a better option.
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*(The above image by nongpimmy is from freedigitalphotos.net).