A contrarian, devil's-advocate-ish post on marital name-change

Name-change and marriage is back in the news, with Jill Filipovic's straightforward, largely unapologetic demand that women cease to take their husbands' names. It's not an essay I entirely agree with (and I'll get to why in a moment) but I liked it all the same - Filipovic says what she thinks, and doesn't hem, haw, and fuss about possibly offending the vast majority of women. And this is as clearly-put as I've ever seen the traditional feminist case against name-change (and choice feminism more broadly): your name is your identity, when you think you're choosing you're really just passively surfing the wave of the patriarchy. I think lots of women probably agree with this, even women who've changed their names or would do so.

Filipovic asks why, despite the growth of egalitarian marriage, this one holdout persists. I'd ask, meanwhile, whether perhaps the egalitarian-ish nature of marriage means that name-change wasn't, all along, the problem. I think there's a growing if largely unspoken understanding that gender is here to stay, but that what we want is equality, not 100% blurring of lines. We don't object to the tendency of women (even staunch second-wave-variety feminists) to wear their hair long, to wear dangly earrings, etc. Heels and makeup get debated, but we don't assume that for a woman to be a feminist, she must cross-dress. (Nor, I think, do we assume that a woman in a men's suit is wearing it to make a feminist point. We assume she just feels like wearing it, or is more comfortable dressing as a man.) What matters is who can do what professionally, who gets paid what, who gets taken seriously. Which is why, on some level, arguments about symbolic trappings fall flat. It really does seem that they can be kept around (and explored by same-sex couples as well) without this necessarily meaning the era of "Leave it to Beaver" has returned.

Anyway, Filipovic allows that name-change can be empowering, giving the example of transgendered individuals, whose original first names never matched their identities. She doesn't give the example of ethnic name change, likely because doing so would bring about WWPD levels of digression, but I will say that those are probably some mix of empowering and internalized-oppressive. But she does explain that in marriage, name-change is oppressive because it refers back to the bad old days of marriage, where the woman was property.

Here's where I'm not convinced. Marriage, name-change or not, refers back to bad old days, feminism-wise. Using feminine pronouns to describe half of humanity points back to less-enlightened times. But the anti-name-change argument seems like yet another case of a common-enough feminist error: that because something is 'what women do,' it's necessarily the inferior situation. Getting paid less, that's definitively worse. Obviously, very very often, the women's version of whichever lot in life is straight-up worse. But, consider makeup. Is it oppressive because men don't (generally) wear it? Or is it oppressive to men that if they want to experiment with their looks, or enhance their beauty, this isn't an option for them? Whatever penalty exists on (some) women (in certain circumstances) who don't wear makeup, it's zilch compared to that on men who do.

So. The line of thought - expressed by Filipovic and many commenters - that you never hear men saying they just thought their spouse's name sounded better, my thinking is, maybe this isn't about women giving some silly reason as a pretext for the 'real' one (patriarchy!) and actually more about the rigid gender roles men must contend with. A man might want to change his name - and for all these reasons: preferring his fiancée's name, wishing to set himself apart from his birth family, not feeling particularly attached to his name - but not see this as a viable option. Women experience some pressure to change their names, but it's probably nothing compared with the pressure men feel not to do so.