Sustainable Nomenclature

[trinityvixen]

What could we do about the marriage practice of changing one spouse's last name (usually the wife's) to the other's that would make the practice a) entirely gender-independent and b) practical for multiple generations?

The best I can figure is that both partners have to change their name in some fashion. Either they would do it upon marrying--John Doe and Jane Smith would pick or be given third, new name, say "Brown"--or they would keep their names but give any children a new one.

That would certainly fulfill requirement a), but I'm still not sure that it's an attractive solution to the problem of b). Unless the parents took the new name and passed that on, having children with a different name from the parents is awkward and inelegant.

What do you all think?

Oh, and please, bear in mind that issues of being able to track genealogy are lesser concerns to me. We live in an age with adequate resources for tracking down that sort of information if you want to build family trees. I don't think "being able to trace/link back to our ancestors" is an effective argument against adopting a new system of nomenclature. Issues of how couples would choose new names are fair game though. I imagine we'd get plenty of crank names as the internet generations get married, to say nothing about the few folk who would expose their ignorance and/or bigotry by appropriating names from cultures not their own (or enhancing their link to diluted bloodlines with usurpation of old names).

Comments

[shell524.livejournal.com]

I've several friends I've found on Facebook who both hyphenated their names.

I'm all for leaving it entirely up to the individuals. Change the husband's name to the wife's. Change the wife's to the husband's. Pick your own. Hyphenate both. Keep your own and give your kids one or the other or something completely different. I don't see why it has to be codified at all.

[habiliments.livejournal.com]

Yes. What she said. I often wonder why people who are perfectly ... oh, I don't know which word to use. Liberated? Forward-thinking? Not tied in to much by way of old patriarchal practices? Still change to the husband's name — I don't want to say without thinking, because I'm sure they think about it, but for reasons utterly mysterious to me.

(The boyfriend and I have talked about this, despite the fact that I don't want to get married [not not to him; not really ever] and he's all for taking my great-grandmother's last name, which starts with the name letter as his and ends with the last three letters of mine. Kind of an interesting middle ground...)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Hyphenation is not sustainable. Not practically. If you have the first generation of all hyphenates, do you have a second gen with multiple hyphenates? It would take longer to write your name after two generations than to do anything else. If the hyphenated parents give only one part of their name from the kid, I don't see how that's any better/worse than just changing names entirely.

Whatever the process, it should not be codified, but that's hardly an issue because, clearly, there will be too much resistance to any effort to ever really get off the ground. What needs to change, however, is the assumption that it should be one or the other.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

I actually kinda like the idea of the portmanteau name (especially as an alternative to hyphenation. Yeesh.) Both partners and all children take the new name. An old friend of my dad's was born Miss Lebenhouse, and when she married Mr. Luft, they became the Lebenlufts.

The problem is that you end up with a lot of weird combinations and unusual names very quickly. John Doe and Jane Smith would become...the Doths? The Smoes? The Smitoes? And when their son married Jenny Jones, do they become the Smitones?

(I think that the children and both parents having the same last name is important, if only for reasons of bureaucratic stupidity. Which name it is is far less important.)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I like the name blend a lot, myself. In fact, that is how I came up with the name "Cromslack" that I donated to ivy03 for a last name to "Awasky." (Cromslack was the amalgamation of two friends' names who got married. Regrettably, she did not choose to take that on, and instead became Mrs. Husband's Name.)

I agree on the point about children--I think it is important that they have the same name. It creates a sense of unity and avoids awkward questions as much as anything.

[viridian.livejournal.com]

Whatever we do, it needs to get more "normal" quickly enough that people won't hesitate at doing it because they'd have to explain themselves so often.

Basically the only reason I took Ben's last name was that I am inherently lazy and don't want to be continually explaining myself. I had to do that enough with the pronunciation of my old name, and it gets exhausting. I also admit I wanted a name that was easier for people to spell and slightly less Google-able.

Also? I will tell you what doesn't really work -- keeping one's maiden name as a second middle name. Technically, I did that. But said second middle name? Doesn't show up anywhere official, so uh. It's basically invisible and I can keep or drop it as I see fit. :/

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine from college had planned to do just that, because her last name was difficult to spell and pronounce. Then she married a man whose last name has a hyphen it in, thought about the life-long paperwork problems, and changed her plans.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

That's the problem, I think, that feminists who have wanted to change the default patriarchal naming system have run up against: inertia.

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

Personally, I think keeping family names is very important. It's not just about genealogy, it's about a sense of lineage, about being able to say "I am part of this heritage, and this name, which has figured here and here in history, is also mine." So I don't hold with the idea of creating new names--I think that's turning our back on our heritage.

I think the best solution is the one several cultures (primarily hispanic, I believe) follow, of hyphenating names in a particular pattern--one child takes the mother's maiden name first and then the father's, the other does it the other way around, etc. Both family names survive and are passed on, neither gender gets priority.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I think that system is very confusing, personally. Also, how does it work past one generation? Mrs. Alvarez and Mr. Rodriguez have a child who becomes Mr. Alvarez-Rodriguez. What are his kids call when he marries Mrs. Diaz-Rivera? Either that's a grandkid with veeeeery long last name, or you drop one of the hyphenated names of each parent--meaning one or another of their names is lost.

[jendaby.livejournal.com]

On the marriage name change forms, it is suggested that a couple could combine their names into something new and both take that name. Usually, it is a hybrid of the two names.

I must say, though, that I have known plenty of people, male and female, who were happy to take their partner's name because they had a negative association with their own family name.

Though it is getting more common for people to keep their birth names, it is still easier to have a family with the same last name when there are children. The amount of paperwork that was easier to fill out yesterday because I could just check "same last name" is amazing...plus, my maiden name is cursed. As soon as it was entered into the system, the computer crashed and locked the woman at the registration desk out of the network.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It's a shame, though, that we make a decision about how to identify ourselves because we loathe other people. I would rather it be an affirmation rather than a refutation, personally.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Well, we could go back to the way they did it in feudal England--the person with the title keeps their name. So, whoever has more assets gets to keep their name, and their spouse has to change it.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

We'd have to stop defining manhood by financial/business success, first. That might be even harder to work out of our collective neuroses than the last name question.

[arcane-the-sage.livejournal.com]

Ummm........ that would mess wit folks like myself who are the 4th generation to hold the same name.

Perhaps the route that was taken with my sister's name (she has both my parent's last names in addition to her first name and middle name).

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

There again, though, you're getting into issues of sustainability. It is not feasible to keep having people with longer names. It's just not. We have too much paperwork to file that barely fits my name (only 20 letters all told), let alone someone with four or more names.

[ahab99.livejournal.com]

I really don't know what sustainable system there is, other than just getting to the point where no choice is so heavily favored that any other option is seen as weird. I mean, I had one high school friend who, when confronted with another friend getting married and discussing the name-change issue (the marrying friend had already started her career, and so a name change had more consequences for her than it often otherwise does) said, "Well, he could take your name, but ew, who does that?" The idea that it was not only an unlikely option for her, but something worthy of "ew" really blew my mind.

I am totally with you that the current system needs to change, but there's not any one option that satisfactorily replaces it. I think that's the reason the inertia is so hard to overcome, unfortunately...

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I agree on the inertia part. Marriage, as an institution, is in its conservative phase right now. Few challenges to it are getting anywhere. Like that case in California where some stupid pair of heterosexual fuckers insisted the state give them paperwork for their license with "husband" and "wife" instead of "party A" and "party B." The push back was fairly astounding, and the state caved.

But a more liberal change is on the horizon with gay marriage, which will bring up more of these questions again, I hope. I find myself, as a feminist, keenly interested in the gay rights movement because of its parallel goals with feminism. (Overturning heternormative patriarchal controls for one.) Gay families are particularly interesting in this question of naming because there isn't an assumption that names will change. As gay marriages become more common, perhaps the push back against the inertia of "it's too hard to change the guy's name" will be surmountable.

For now, however, the pressure against men changing their name is on par with someone doing so without marriage as a reason. With good reason, we make it difficult in this country to just change your name. (As a means of preventing fraud, mostly.) But men wanting to change to their wives' names are met as hostilely as someone wanting to change their name for any other reason. Women wanting to change to their husbands, on the other hand, have a harder time keeping their own. (See comment by viridian above.) We need to level that expenditure of energy on the part of the couple so that the name issue can be determined by what is the couple's wish--do they want to be more/less unique (like examples above)? Is there a wish to join one family more than the other? Professional considerations, as you pointed out? Those should be the priority to my mind.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

I actually take a fairly progressive line on this: I don't think women should change their names when they marry (unless they want to, of course), and kids should take the last names of their mothers. There's less room for confusion that way.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I don't know that the kids should take either parent's name--it's like that parent "owns" them more that way. That's why I was wondering if there weren't a better system to avoid even that allusion.

[cassiphone.livejournal.com]

I've always been of the opinion that the one with the cooler name should win out.

But then I'm also resistant to the idea of changing names at all because of the identity issues associated with it. I let my daughter have her father's name because his is more distinctive and he has more of a family history (my surname is one my mother invented after her divorce because she disliked her maiden name).

I use their name for family/school reasons to make things easier but on the whole I'm okay with us not sharing one. It's also not a bad thing to keep mine as a work name and have an 'undercover' name for household stuff...

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I think it's fine for the "cooler" name to win out. We just have to get over people giving that the stink-eye. It needs to be more of a choice, in other words, than an assumption.

[sols-light.livejournal.com]

As academics, which I will assume quite a few people reading this are, it gets another layer of complication, if you change your name, there's no guarantee your publication record will follow you properly. This is a major disincentive to female academics especially to do anything about their names.

That said, I've changed my name to something which is my mother's chosen surname after choosing to live with her instead of my father. That name isn't the one she was born with, but is the one she has her major qualifications under. I'm adopted anyway, so the whole point of genetic heritage is a bit moot and to me, what really matters is an easily pronounced name people can normally spell, since my first name, Nicolai usually screws people up enough.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Adoptions are another example of the uselessness of genealogy defenses, far as I'm concerned. :)

The academic issue is a really hard one, too. My sister has published under her maiden name, and is basically keeping it and not objecting if she's referred to as Mrs. HerHusband'sLastName. Her daughter has her husband's last name, though, which is almost silly because his dad was adopted, too. His last name makes him sound Scottish when, in fact, he's 100% Norwegian. Perhaps that's informing my scoffing at this stuff--knowing people whose last names aren't reflective of their background in the first place...

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

enhancing their link to diluted bloodlines with usurpation of old names

I'm not sure it's fair to condemn this. At this point, I'm an Irish/German mix. Chuckro has English/Jewish/Gypsy/Greek/and possibly some stuff I'm forgetting mixed in. Our children will have a Greek name. Despite the fact that, percentage-wise, they're more Irish than anything else, and that they're really not anything but American. If they were to choose a name from somewhere on the family tree, it would be a different origin, but no less legitimate than the origin they allegedly have.

In a couple more generations, Americans' bloodlines will probably be so diluted that last name won't be particularly indicative of anything.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking less of melting-pot equality than I am of people abusing it. There are plenty of people like those idiot Aryans who named their kid Adolf Hitler who would happily name themselves that given half a chance or something similar to bolster their claim of purity. Generally, I like avoid legitimizing any such efforts, though I concede there would be no way to effectively weed those people out.

[slackwench.livejournal.com]

If both parties change their names to something else unrelated to either ones' birth name, there really isn't a point to last names anymore. You might as well do away with them entirely.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I don't think that's so. I think it would strengthen the family unit. They wouldn't be one or another family, they would be their own. If the nuclear family is our (current) ideal for a family, we should celebrate any efforts to ensure its stability and independence, right?

[umeyard.livejournal.com]

So what brought on this tangent?

Me, I just want a short last name that comes at the beginning of the alphabet.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking about it. I think about cray-cray things when I am bored at work. (Which is often.)

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

I think it's fine the way it is. I think some women like changing it, and anyone who has a problem can take it on a case-by-case basis.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

My question is, why does there need to be an overall change? I understand the system is biased, but it seems like a bias that on the whole doesn't bother people. Even if you enacted a new system, I bet more than 75% of the world would just continue with the status quo, and even if there wasn't an overall change, you could still object to it on a personal level in your own marriage.

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

I like what my boss did: Patrick Hayden married Teresa Nielsen and they became the Nielsen Haydens, no hyphen. They both changed their names.

Personally, I'm keeping my name. It's partly a sense of feminism (I'm not interested in family history so it's got nothing to do with feeling "ties" to anything), and party because absolutely NOTHING goes well with my first name. :)

Generally, I'm for go with the cooler name, and either both should change their names or neither. As for kids, well, I dunno? I liked the Roman naming system that way.

I wish I had a cool last name. Man. :(

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I wish I had a cool last name, too. Or at least a shorter one. Then again, my full name is exactly 20 letters long, and I've always like how round a number that was. (I am weird, I realize this.)

Part of me is cheating here since I'm not all that enthused about a) marrying or b) having kids, so I don't have a dog in the fight so much. Would I feel bad if I lost my name? Yes, actually. Which is why even though I would be happy if we just removed the stigma of men changing names, I wouldn't be entirely happy. I think that it must be very hard for people to shed their identifiers. I'm not overly attached to mine, but thinking about losing it does give me pause. I can't help but think it would strengthen a marriage, even only psychologically, to have neither partner forced to give up his/her name and, instead, figure out a compromise (either like PNH/TNH's or a new name entirely).

[slackwench.livejournal.com]

We should go back to the original system: your last name is your job. In fact, we could go to further extremes and have your name as a whole be your job. You only get a name independent of that if you do something noteworthy enough to deserve it.

Alternately: you just get a given name. When you do something worth remembering, you get a title. Like "x the y" or "x <verb>".

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I like it!

[mithras03.livejournal.com]

I had teachers in high school - Quakers, so they're all about the gender equality - who combined their last names. One was Crauder, the other, Reuff, so they became Craudereuff, and their kids had that last name. How's that?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

That's certainly one solution. I approve of that one as far as equality is concerned.