What’s the Feminist Solution to Surnames?
November 17, 2010 by Laura Gottesdiener · 23 Comments
My 12-letter, four-syllable surname is Gottesdiener. Its German translation–”servant of God”–is quite beautiful, but the name itself has given me my fair share of trouble. In elementary school I was the last student to learn to spell her name, and in middle school there was the familiar taunt “Laura’s Got-a-steamer! Laura’s Got-a-steamer!”
These days, the name gives me trouble for another reason: feminism. If I marry, what’s a Gottesdiener to do? Abandon the name my young self worked so hard to spell? Hyphenate with my partner’s name? Combine the two into one? In the event I marry my current partner, my name would become Gottesdiener-Stein. Or Gottesdienerstein. That’s a bit … long.
The simplest feminist answer would be keep your own name. OK–but what if we become parents? What do we call the kids? Do we hyphenate, combine, reinvent … throw our hands in the air?
We at Ms. spent the day brainstorming feminist solutions to the surname predicament, using traditions from around the world. Let us know which is your favorite!
Photo by Flickr user kaatjevervoort under Creative Commons 2.0.
My husband and I decided that we would both legally change our names by adding each other's last names. We agreed that any children would have my surname as the middle name and his surname as the last name. It was a mutual decision and it worked out well for us.
i thought the point of this article is to change the surname. reading yours seems like your children’s surname is still the surname i.e. still the father’s!
Whichever last name is cooler! Seriously.
My boyfriend and I gave our children his mother's maiden name as their surname.
My choice is not listed on here…it's closest to the Spanish tradition, but w/ no dropping the mom's name later. I kept my last name, he kept his. Our kids will be hyphenates and what they do later in life is up to them! I don't need to figure out what they should do if they marry another hyphenate. That will be up to them!
We did the same thing . . . but without the hyphens. What they do in the future with their double last name is up to them!
What if you're future husband doesn't want to do any of those? What if he isn't a feminist?
So, don’t marry him!
Well, when it comes to your name upon marriage, grown women get to make their own decisions. If he doesn't respect your desires in that regard, what else is he going to disrespect about you? Not a good start to a marriage.
When it comes to children, there should be compromise. And it's good to talk about these possibilities before marriage (even if you're not planning on children; accidents happen). I
Make up a new name. My father did that for me and my uncle recently did that for my baby cousin. My last name is Shilpi, which means "art". My new cousin's last name is basically means "everyone's friend", aka "really friendly person".
I've actually written on my blog about my name – I call it my best gift from my parents:
http://nano-muse.livejournal.com/1240.html
The "make it up" option can also fit with the Sioux and Elision options.
Our decision was similar to Holly's. We both kept our own last names. Our son has my husband's last name, and my last name as his second middle name. We came upon this decision because my last name is much harder to spell and pronounce.
So, I'll be the first feminist to post at say that I took my husband's last name and completely dropped mine. I wasn't fond of my last name and there are plenty of people to carry it on. I think having the same last name gives you family unity. He couldn't change his due to professional concerns (read: he had a reputation on his name). I don't want to hypenate any children's names, or my own. I struggled with this decision quite a bit, thinking that I was betraying my feminism if I took his name. In the end, feminism is about having the choice. I chose to take his name, and I'm happy with my decision. I think any of the above options are good.
Spain is in a debate, because government don't want to keep the rule "if no consensus, father's surname first". The fact is that almost everyone has her/his paternal surname first as a (patriarchal) tradition, but we legally identify ourselves by both. However, nowadays we tend to use only the first surname (laziness? foreign influence?).
I'm Spanish and it's really difficult when I go abroad to keep my two surnames I have and I want to be kept. They have called me only by my first, but once they called me by my second because they thought my first surname was my middle-name!
My option is creativity: let's choose the surname(s) as well as we choose the name. This creativity can also ends in hybridation.
I have this same discussions on a daily basis as I'm a first generation Mexican living in the US. People think I married someone else (my husband is not latino/hispanic), that it's my middle name, or reporters use the wrong name, etc. I often get the "what do I call you" question. I actually insist that people use my apellidos properly, and I'm happy to enlighten them about the practice–it's only a burden if we let them convince us that it is.
My wife and I (who am also female) decided that she would take my name, but retain her maiden name as a middle name. Her legal name, and the one she uses professionally, is "Brigid Maidenname Lastname". We are discussing the possibility of giving our children her maiden name as a last name.
We will each keep our last names. The kids can have his surname. There are enough people in the world with my surname. I like it, but don't feel the need to pass it along my gene-line.
First names, OTOH, are very important to me. I have a unique name that I chose myself and had legally changed. My children will have special names, and I get to choose those. I figure naming them is my reward for, you know, labor and all.
how bout both people just keep their names and if they have the child, the child hyphenates.
there's a bizarre amount of patriarchy in this discussion for a feminist magazine – why is family unity a good idea? if you want unity then why can't it be plural? as in we are the name name (name..) family/clan. why erase cultural markers like names that show heritage because the current place of habitation doesn't understand/pronounce them… why assume children have two parents and not five? as for marrying (whatever the sexes and genders of the participants) – why are we even still considering it?
You missed one obvious solution — each partner keeps their own name upon marriage and you toss a coin for the last name of the child(ren). Heads it's one person's last name, tails it's the others. It's completely random, and hence there's no patriarchal influence on the decision. Whoever has the last name that ended up on the losing side of the coin toss gets to choose a familial name for the child's first and/or middle name (so long as the other parent doesn't hate the choice). In this way my daughter ended up with my husband's last name but my middle name and a first name that I chose and he also liked.
My husband and I wanted to combine names, but there was no nice combo available. We ended up trading last names as middle names. For babies, the first child gets the parent's name of that sex. So if the first child is a girl, she'll get my last name, and if he's a boy, my husband's. But this is where we differ from the norm: the second child gets the name of the un-passed down spouse. And it'll go back and forth like that.
I forget where I read this, but I like the idea that is similar to the Jessica solution, except that any sons got the mother's surname and daughters got the father's.
what about not getting married and partaking in a patriarchal institution and be happy with your comitment to one another.
A late night feminist rant from one of the old timers. My niece just gave her baby her husband’s last name and I’m astounded that this nonsense continues across generations, even in “progressive” families. What is it that these young women don’t get about patriarchy? Especially after nine months of doing the heavy lifting to bring this child into the world. OK. my last name (and hers) are paternal, as are our mothers and grandmothers but STILL, you do have a relationship to that name, an emotional attachment, a history with it, and after all that preparation and labor to bring this child to life, why would you give it the guy’s surname? what are you perpetuating? and why?