I Am Not a Mrs.

I  am sure its nice for the whole family to have one name, and it’s nice to have the same name as your kids. And sometimes when we travel together I feel like the odd-person out. And sometimes it is confusing. But so what? None of those reasons were good enough to convince me to throw out my name and take my husband’s. And yes, the kids have my husband’s  name and they have Waverman in there as a middle name, so yes their legal names are long but it makes it a lot easier when crossing the border.

Sorry to get all judgy on you, but if you changed your name then I have lost a little respect for you. I am sure people have lots of personal reasons to want to jettison their last name. But the tradition of changing one’s name is straight from the patriarchy, it denotes ownership clear and simple. I never considered doing it, and I am a little bit shocked when people I know and admire do.

One of the most romantic conversations my husband (then fiancée)and I had was on this topic. A few days before the wedding I said to him: Is there any part of you that wants me to change my name? His answer: You wouldn’t be you if you wanted to change your name.

That is my kind of romance.

I understand that most women change their names because they want their family to be a unit. I find that faulty logic – you are a unit, it doesn’t matter what your last name is. A name doesn’t make a family.

In fact, my mother and father have been divorced for 35 years and she still has his name because she didn’t change it back when they split and she didn’t take her second husband’s name. So she lives on with her other husband’s name. Understandably but maybe a little cynically, she advises just to stay out of the whole mess and stick with what you were born with.

We have friends who combined their last names into a new name, and friends who combined their middle names into a whole new name (Benjamin and Marie into Benmar). We have friends who have both hyphenated, or just the woman hyphenated or just the kids. And it all works out.

In Quebec it is extremely difficult to change your name because of marriage and it seems like the tradition is dying in Canada. But in the U.S. the last estimate was that 90 percent of women change their names. We lived in the U.S. for two years after we were married and I was shocked at the amount of pressure and questioning I got for keeping my name. From credit card companies to our landlord; everyone made me feel like I was some kind of pariah for not being a Mrs. . But that is better than crying a few weeks before my wedding like my cousin did because she wanted to keep her name and her mother was forcing her to take her husband to-be’s.

The Lucy Stone League is an American organization that is committed to “equal rights for women and men to create, retain, modify and keep their own names”. They are named after Lucy Stone (1818-1893), a suffragette who famously said, “ "A wife should no more take her husband's name than he should her's. My name is my identity and must not be lost." She was also the first woman to legally keep her name after marriage.

And now that same-sex marriage is legal: do we expect partners of the same sex to change their names? Probably not, we only expect it when it is a woman and a man. And why is that?

T-shirt and stickers available at http://www.cafepress.ca/lucystone

UPDATE: There were lots of opinions for and against on this post. Click here for some of my thoughts and check back on Monday when I will gather up some of the most thoughtful posts on both sides of the issue.

Don't want to read all the comments? Read my comment round-up.