yonmei

yonmei @ 07:26 pm: My first legal possession
Sometime before I was six weeks old, my dad gave me something that is my first legal possession, and the only thing I own that even death will never take from me.

I say my dad, because when I was born I believe it was still his legal obligation, not my mum's: and what he gave, though it became mine, is also his.

My surname.

My given names were decided by both my parents, though my mum says my middle name was after her brother. (So was my brother's middle name. Not my sister's, though.)

I share my surname with my dad, and with his dad, and so on back to the mists of Exeter, but it's mine for all of that. (And in Scotland, at least, it's decidedly more unusual a name than my mum's surname.)

When I was born, it was unusual for a woman to retain the use of her own surname (even in Scotland: and my parents married in Canada) though in Scotland, then as now, a woman never legally gave up her own surname. In England (and in Canada) a woman can and still often does, go through a swift and merciless legal change of surname when she marries: in England, there's even a box to check on the marriage certificate.

Scotland is different, a fact that did not sink in until years ago when I was looking round an old Borders graveyard with an American friend and we both noticed all the women lying buried under their own surnames, not their husband's surnames: though in life they would have been addressed as "Mrs Husbandname", in death they were buried under their legal name.

In Scotland today, it is legal for a person to change their name simply by doing so and using that changed name for two years - at which point they can apply to the General Register Office for Scotland and ask to have their birth certificate changed, if they so choose. So a woman who wants to change her surname to her husband's, or a man who wants to change his to his wife's, may simply be addressed by that name (though as Mr Myddelton found out, getting people to do so is difficult) and after two years, can even confound generations of researchers down the line by having their birth certificate changed. (Though GROS may keep track of that. I've never looked into it.)

Apparently "only about 50 per cent of women now take their husband's name" and many "double-barrel, or 'mesh', their surnames together". (I recall a Dilbert thread from seven years ago that ran to a thousand comments before it finally died, after a woman mentioned in passing how troublesome she would find it to have everything she used her name on changed when she got married - asked to find out if Dilbert fans could think of a way of making this easier! - and got a flood of responses, of which about 50% were "Yes, there is a way: don't change your name!" and the other 50% were "No, there is no way - you'd just invite identity fraud.")

There is no argument that for a woman to change her surname to her husband's is, 99% of the time, done for straightforwardly sexist reasons. (Exceptions exist on both sides where one of the couple genuinely hates their surname and sees marriage as an ideal opportunity to change it, or where one of the couple is in a foreign country and their own surname is unspellable by the natives, - or where one of the couple is the only representative in their generation to have that surname, and will never change it. But the rule holds. And I bet more woman have changed their surname resignedly to their husband's even though - they both hate the husband's surname or the combination of his surname with her given name or where the wife's surname is unique and unusual - than men have changed their surname to their wife's for any of the non-sexist good reasons.)

One-sided arguments such as "But it shows the woman's love for the man" (and he doesn't love her?) or "But it means she's really part of his family" (and he's not part of hers?) are sexist, not charming.

As for the "but think of the children!" argument:

However, Stephanie Gill, who has been married for seven years, sees a potential problem in this for future generations. While she flits between her maiden name and her husband's ("his for bills and bank accounts, mine for work"), her children have her husband's surname and her maiden name as a middle name. "Double-barrelled names sound pretentious," she says. "And what happens down the line? Our great-great grandchildren could have been lumbered with eight surnames."

This one-sided argument that takes for granted that any children the woman bears will not have her surname, but her husband's, with her name as an unused add-on, is even more stubborn than the presumption that she herself will take her husband's name: the lingering tradition that a man marries to ensure he has children that are wholly his. (Even if 20% of children born to married women are fathered by someone other than the woman's husband, the expectation is that they transmit his surname to future generations - at least the boys do.) A married woman who neither takes her husband's surname nor confers his surname on their children, is really screwing up that tradition: the children may be genetically half his, but they don't have or transmit his surname.

Obviously this is never an argument I'm going to have to have, but from watching my sister have it (her son has our shared surname) I know how stubborn she had to be. And she and my nephew's dad weren't married - I can't begin to imagine how stubborn a wife would have to be to say "no, the surname that goes on the birth certificate of the children I bore is going to be my surname".

It's difficult because this (in a good relationship, and one would hope that a couple getting married/having children did have a good relationship) is male privilege/sexist oppression exercised with love and affection: the man has the whole weight of society on his side, and need not even be nasty about it. Most of the time, he can win the argument without the woman even having it - many women, having been brought up in the belief that they don't themselves ever really have surnames (the number of women who have said to me "It's my father's name, why should I care about it?"!) will change their surname without - apparently - any sense of loss. They've given up their first legal possession, that not even death could have taken from them unwilling, and declined their right to transmit it whole to their children... and because they were taught all their lives that it was never theirs, they don't regret losing it.

But it is sexist oppression. A person's name is theirs. The argument about who gets the children named after them is one that could be made on a number of rational grounds (My nephew's father; "But wouldn't it be nice for us all to have the same name?" - My sister; "Okay. You change yours to mine.") but is usually not argued rationally at all.

As a simple matter of fair exchange for labour, though the genetic contribution will be equal, a mother will have given nine months labour to create the baby by the time it's born, and is likely to spend far more of the first 6 months to 2 years caring for the child than the father is. (I am using breastfeeding/pre-nursery school as a marker: stats say that the woman will most likely spend more of the next 18 years caring for the child than the man will. But once past breastfeeding/paid maternity leave, there's no reason why a father can't spend 50% of his time caring for his child: he just mostly doesn't.) So, logically, if a man wants the children a woman bears to have his surname, he had better come up with some good and rational argument why she shouldn't get to give them hers.

But mostly, it seems to go the other way: tradition and privilege exempt men from having to make any particular argument, while a woman must fight for it. (I can think of only one exception, and that one the mother in a relationship of parents so complex I can readily believe all four simply decided it was simplest to let mother-right be the decider.)

The problem doesn't come up with civil partners (though various doom-sayers claimed it would) because the issue of male privilege/sexist oppression/backed by societal disapproval doesn't exist. A man marrying another man has no tradition on his side to help him force his surname on his partner, nor any systematic societal approval that would let him. A woman marrying another woman has no tradition against her to force her to surrender her surname in exchange for her partner's, and no systematic societal disapproval that resists her keeping her own surname. The issue is thus talked out rationally, and most couples each retain their own name, though some change names - double-barrelled, meshing, surrender, totally new.

I know feminists who would change their names without argument, or who already did. And I wouldn't say that doesn't make them feminist. It just means they have looked realistically at the situation and decided not to spoil a lovely relationship with their in-laws, a loving relationship with husband, and a stable relationship with their own family, by bucking the trend and causing family resentment for decades. (As my sister found, you cannot even count on your own family to support you when you go against the system like this: I was literally the only one of her family, including our mum-the-Sixties-feminist, who was cheerfully and openly pleased/proud that she was retaining her surname and giving it to her son.)