Podcast: What would a feminist do? Keep your last name or take your spouse's?

By swirlingthoughts on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons License. Available at

"What would a feminist do? Keep your last name or take your spouse's?" 21 minutes, Host: Jessica Valenti, guest sociologist Laurie Scheuble, May 26, 2016

A friend recommended this podcast via Facebook and I found it incredibly interesting and helpful.

UPDATED POST with review 

Summary:  

Valenti starts out the podcast with a monologue wondering about people's hesitance in admitting that the tradition of a woman taking her husband's name upon marriage is a sexist tradition. As she says, "I think we all negotiate living in a sexist world in different ways," and she doesn't judge anyone for taking such actions, but claiming it's not a sexist tradition is disingenuous. She also points out that though women who change their names often discuss how much they dislike their last name, you never hear the same thing said by men with terrible last names, and it's entirely possible to change your last name before marriage. (I question this a bit actually - you can change your name before marriage but it's made very difficult by most states. It costs a considerable amount of money, there's usually a publication requirement, and you have to appear in court. It's all about preventing people from changing their names just to commit fraud and avoid debts). 

In the main podcast, where Valenti speaks to Scheuble, the sociologist opines, "[T]here's no norm that operates as strongly as women changing their last name when they get married. ...it's so structured. We have convinced men and women that 1. If a woman loves a man she'll change her name and 2. The guy is obviously convinced that this is what people do, why are you even questioning this?" She doesn't foresee any shift in this phenomenon any time soon. She's also seen a great deal of defensiveness and rationalization among women who change their name. 

Valenti and Scheuble discuss numerous other topics, including people's intense hatred for hyphenation (Why do people hate hyphenation so much anyway? I need to know.) There's also a touching segment that includes viewpoints from a variety of women, including one woman who said she wanted to take her husband's name so she'd have the same name as her children after she saw her aunt struggle with picking up her kids at the airport due to having a different then them.*

Scheuble wraps things up by pointing to a few interesting facts. She's currently conducting a study that does seem to indicate that men identify and attach more to children with their last names, with the effect appearing particularly strong in sons. There haven't really been any studies on surname trends among married homosexual couples yet, pretty much because gay marriage is so new in America still, but statistics that are out there do seem to indicate that people in same sex marriages are less likely to change their surnames. Scheuble surmises that this could be the result of the fact that these couples are generally older than your average heterosexual married couple and have simply had more life experience with their birth name.

 My Thoughts:

I find the entire podcast to be mostly nonjudgmental of women's decisions, but there definitely is a bit of a bias toward women who keep their birth name. Both the host and the expert kept their names and do tend to come at the issue from that standpoint. I do love that Valenti straight-up notes that this is a sexist tradition. It's hard to deny that, but people do it all the time. It may have a different meaning in your life and in your relationship, but there's no denying that its roots are problematic.

Similarly, wearing a wedding dress has sexist roots, as does wearing a wedding ring and any number of traditions in both weddings and day to day life. I am wearing a white dress on my wedding day. I also quite proudly wear my engagement ring and I really enjoy engaging in several feminine traditions that originated and are continued partly because of sexism, including wearing makeup and pretty clothes and keeping a lovely house. However, there are several traditions I reject as too sexist for me to handle - such as having my dad walk me down the aisle or the entire garter thing. Again - "We all negotiate living in a sexist world in different ways." (Can you tell I really like this quote?) I'd rather have my eyes open to all these things, think them through, and then make my choice about which traditions to embrace and engage with in my own life than to just pretend there aren't any problematic histories involved with them. Others may prefer to take a different approach, and that's fine too. We don't all need to overthink things as much as I do (I fully admit that I'm a little eccentric in wanting to know everything about everything. It's also just plain exhausting sometimes. You are welcome to live a less examined life and probably sleep better at night than I do, neurotic as I am.). Either way, I'm not going to judge you. 

*I've really wondered about this. I never had trouble growing up with a mom with a different last name then me, but people can be much more paranoid about security now than they were in the 90s when I was a young'un. Is this a real problem now? 

"Conjugal Rights" and the Right to Refuse to Have Sex

As yet another reminder of "Dear God am I happy I was born when I was and not a few hundred years ago," married women in England only gained the right to refuse to have sex with their husbands fairly recently. These excerpts outline how that situation evolved.

Detail from The Courtship by John Collet (1766)

"A husband's right to sexual intercourse was assured by law in several ways. Firstly, by the law and custom of marriage. Sir Matthew Hale commented in 1736 that it was impossible for a husband to be tried for rape, because by marrying the wife had 'given herself up' sexually to her husband and could never retract that consent.

Secondly, an ancient right under canon law allowed either party to claim restoration of 'conjugal rights' (i.e. cohabitation). Under the 1857 Divorce Act, refusal to cohabit after being ordered to do so by a judge was contempt of court and could entail a prison sentence. Once a woman was cohabiting with her husband he could rape her with impunity. As Oswald Dawson put it in 1895, a wife was 'at the mercy of the carnal appetite of the man ... at all times and without regard to the state of her health, or any other considerations', he continued, 'This slavery of compulsory cohabitation is surely chattel-like'. He concluded, 'until a woman who is a wife can say, at least at certain times....'I wish to sleep alone'... she can never consider herself free'.

The Matrimonial Causes Act 1884 reformed the law so that a refusal to restore conjugal rights no longer led to imprisonment but was deemed to be desertion, which was then grounds for divorce. From then, wives are found applying to court for 'the restitution of conjugal rights', not because they wanted their husbands to move back in, but as the first step towards getting a divorce." Excerpt from  History of Women: Marriage, by Helena Wojtczak (an excellent website that you should go read!) 

The Court of Chancery in the early 19th century (1808) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_of_Chancery#/media/File:Court_of_Chancery_edited.jpg

"The 1884 Act thus gave effect to the policy that it was oppressive and unnecessary to imprison those who preferred to live apart from their spouses. But the extent to which the courts were prepared to recognise the existence of legally enforceable ‘rights’ in the family context remained unclear. Only a few years later, a sensational case illustrated the difficulty:

In R v. Jackson a husband applied for and obtained a decree for restitution of conjugal rights against his newly married wife, and set about enforcing it. Assisted by two young men (one a solicitor’s articled clerk) he seized her as she was leaving church in the Lancashire town of Clitheroe and forced her into a carriage, claiming to have used no more force than was absolutely necessary to separate her from the sister he believed to be responsible for what had happened. Mrs Jackson was kept in the husband’s house in Blackburn in charge of her sister and a nurse and she was visited by a doctor. The husband claimed that he showed her every kindness and consideration and that she had the free run of the house,  ‘doing just as she pleased, save leaving the house’; and that he ‘had offered several times to take her for a drive, but she had declined to go’. The wife’s relatives instituted habeas corpus proceedings; and the Court of Appeals rejected the husband’s argument that a husband had the right to enforce the ‘general dominion’ he had over his wife by imprisoning her if she refused him the conjugal rights to which a court had declared him entitled. Lord Esher MR regarded the 1884 Act as the ‘strongest possible evidence to shew that the legislature had no idea that a power would remain in the husband to imprison the wife for himself, not least because to accept this view would result in his being allowed to act as party judge and executioner.

The Jackson decision was at the time unpopular in some quarters, and it was certainly widely misunderstood. But it is a landmark in family law: the decision recognises that the ‘rights’ which exist between husband and wife are of a different order than (say) the rights of the parties to a commercial contract. But the question of ‘how different’ remained difficult." 

Legal Consequences of marriage: Conjugal Rights and Remedies (an excerpt from Stephen Cretney, Family Law in the Twentieth Century: A History, Oxford University Press (2003))

Fun fact: Under English law, women only gained the right to divorce her husband on the grounds of adultery alone in 1923. Men previously were the only ones to have that right.

The action of restitution of conjugal rights was only abolished in 1970, though at that point it was rarely used. The equivalent legal actions in Scotland and Ireland were abolished in 1984 and 1988, respectively. 

"Getting Married": George Bernard Shaw on Marriage

"MARRIAGE AS A MAGIC SPELL

The truth which people seem to overlook in this matter is that the marriage ceremony is quite useless as a magic spell for changing in an instant the nature of the relations of two human beings to one another. If a man marries a woman after three weeks acquaintance, and the day after meets a woman he has known for twenty years, he finds, sometimes to his own irrational surprise and his wife's equally irrational indignation, that his wife is a stranger to him, and the other woman an old friend.

Also, there is no hocus pocus that can possibly be devized with rings and veils and vows and benedictions that can fix either a man's or woman's affection for twenty minutes, much less twenty years. Even the most affectionate couples must have moments during which they are far more conscious of one another's faults than of one another's attractions. There are couples who dislike one another furiously for several hours at a time; there are couples who dislike one another permanently; and there are couples who never dislike one another; but these last are people who are incapable of disliking anybody. If they do not quarrel, it is not because they are married, but because they are not quarrelsome. The people who are quarrelsome quarrel with their husbands and wives just as easily as with their servants and relatives and acquaintances: marriage makes no difference.

Those who talk and write and legislate as if all this could be prevented by making solemn vows that it shall not happen, are either insincere, insane, or hopelessly stupid. There is some sense in a contract to perform or abstain from actions that are reasonably within voluntary control; but such contracts are only needed to provide against the possibility of either party being no longer desirous of the specified performance or abstention. A person proposing or accepting a contract not only to do something but to like doing it would be certified as mad. Yet popular superstition credits the wedding rite with the power of fixing our fancies or affections for life even under the most unnatural conditions."

The entire play and its amazing preface is available for free online here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5604/5604-h/5604-h.htm

Well that's a little terrifying

Source: A World of Ways to Say "I Do," Noah Benshea & Jordan Benshea

The One Where Friends Paid Tribute to an Actress's Marriage

Remember that one time Courtney Cox got married in 1999 and became Courtney Cox Arquette and as a joke, the Friends cast and executive producers all had Arquette added to their last names in the opening credits? That was pretty funny.

On the Legal Side: State Laws that Explicitly Allow a Man to Take his Wife's Name

To be fair, that headline actually means "to take his wife's name with the same relative level of ease that a woman has in changing her name upon marriage instead of having to go through a lot of court and publication shenanigans."

"One or both parties to a marriage may elect to change the surname by which he or she wishes to be known after the solemnization of the marriage... [to] (i) the surname of the other spouse; or (ii) any former surname of either spouse; or (iii) a name combining into a single surname all or a segment of the premarriage surname or any former surname of each spouse; or (iv) a combination name separated by a hyphen, provided that each part of such combination surname is the premarriage surname, or any former surname, of each of the spouses."

"(b) Every application for a marriage license shall contain a statement to the following effect:

NOTICE TO APPLICANTS

(1) Every person has the right to adopt any name by which he or she wishes to be known simply by using that name consistently and without intent to defraud.

(2) A person's last name (surname) does not automatically change upon marriage, and neither party to the marriage must change his or her last name.  Parties to a marriage need not have the same last name.

(3) One or both parties to a marriage may elect to change the surname by which he or she wishes to be known after the solemnization of the marriage by entering the new name in the space below.  Such entry shall consist of one of the following surnames:

(i) the surname of the other spouse;  or

(ii) any former surname of either spouse;  or

(iii) a name combining into a single surname all or a segment of the premarriage surname or any former surname of each spouse;  or

(iv) a combination name separated by a hyphen, provided that each part of such combination surname is the premarriage surname, or any former surname, of each of the spouses.

(4) The use of this option will have the effect of providing a record of the change of name.  The marriage certificate, containing the new name, if any, constitutes proof that the use of the new name, or the retention of the former name, is lawful.

(5) Neither the use of, nor the failure to use, this option of selecting a new surname by means of this application abrogates the right of each person to adopt a different name through usage at some future date."

New York Domestic Relations Law § 15.

"Married persons; civil union partners. Upon marriage or civil union, each of the parties to a marriage or partners in a civil union shall declare the middle and last names each will use as a married person or civil union partner. The last name or names chosen may be any middle or last name legally used at any time, past or present, by either spouse or partner, or any combination of such names, which may, but need not, be separated by a hyphen. The middle name or names chosen may be any middle or last name legally used at any time, past or present, by either spouse or partner, or any combination of such names, which may, but need not, be separated by a hyphen."

HAW. REV. STAT. ANN. § 574-1 

Other state law citations: GA. CODE ANN. § 19-3-33.1 (1999); IOWA CODE ANN. § 595.5 (2001); LA. CIV. CODE ANN. art. 100 (2002); MASS. ANN. LAWS ch. 46, § ID (1991); N.D. CENT. CODE § 14-03-20.1 (1996).

More on Men Taking Their Wives' Names

In Marriage, Men are Taking Women's Names, By "The Writers", Man Repeller 

 http://www.manrepeller.com/2015/11/men-taking-womens-last-names.html

I happened across this article tonight while waiting for my cue in my theater troupe's dress rehearsal of Much Ado About Nothing (I'm an understudy and we're having a special understudy performance this Sunday!). I'm writing this on my phone so forgive any lack of polish. The casual discussion between the two writers in this article is surprisingly traditional for an article on a site named Man Repeller but very insightful.

I particularly like this exchange: 

"Amelia: If you had the chance now, do you think you would ask Abie to take your name?

Leandra: I don’t think I would. I’d feel uncomfortable. That’s telling isn’t it? Maybe I’m old-fashioned

Amelia: Old fashioned in that specific category, sure, but then again, getting married is old fashioned. Having your dad walk you down the aisle while you’re wearing white is old fashioned. But it’s also kind of modern because these are things that still happen.
No one’s thinking about your virginity when you wear white
No one thinks your dad is selling you off for political reasons when he walks you down the aisle
What’s cool is that now, doing these things is a choice because we have the freedom to do whatever the hell we want."

The comment section is also full of little jewels like this:

"Chandler Dunn: I think tradition and stigma have a lot to do with women taking the man's last name, and I wonder if it is because we subconsciously see women, or really any person being proposed to, as the one being invited into something. I think we subconsciously forget we are creating something, not joining."

Basically, it's a short but delightful read. Go check it out! 

Random Recent Surname News

• Husbands could take wives' surname under Marriage equality bill (Malta Today)
  Apparently Malta has separate statuses for civil unions and marriages with their own unique rules about surname changes. The article says, "[A]s it stands, men can take their wives’ surnames if they enter into a civil union with them but not if they marry them. The ultimate aim is to have equality across the board.”
   
• 'I didn't want to lose my identity when I got married': The new rules of name changing (Telegraph)
  This gossipy article gives an interesting overview of name changing views in the UK today and mentions the common occurrence of women who didn't change their names on marriage being called by their husband's name anyway. It also includes this ridiculous metaphor for one interviewee's view on the subject -  “I haven’t been gobbled up by a Pac-Man husband and spat out as something dependent or weaker or owned,” she says. “That, to me, symbolically, is what taking a husband’s surname would feel like.”  (Sidenote: I genuinely take issue with people saying changing your name at marriage means you lose your identity; it annoys me to no end. However, I do love a good Pac-man reference.)
   
• I always wanted to be a Gabbar, says Vidya Balan (The Asian Age)
  From the very end of a Bollywood actress's interview. I love that she says something judgmental and then immediately says that she won't judge ("I don’t think any woman should change her surname. But then, to each their own. I am no one to sit and judge.").

Review: Marriage, A History, By Stephanie Coontz

Although my primary research interest is in the history and culture of surname changes at marriage around the world, I will be reading and writing about other books, articles, and other forms of media more focused on marriage culture and history generally as well. This is partly because I have yet to find any books actually focused on name changes specifically and partly because the subject is super interesting in its own right.

What is this book about? 

This book traces the history and evolution of marriage throughout the world, with a bit more of an emphasis on Western societies in Europe and America, particularly toward the later chapters. It's incredibly well researched and takes a very in-depth, mostly chronological look at the purpose, laws, cultural significance, economic place, and religious status of marriage in the environment of each time period while weaving in quotes, anecdotes, and snippets about related topics from primary sources and literature. This style of weaving in an impressive amount of facts into each page works well for me, but I could see that this might become overwhelming to someone less incredibly nerdy. 

Who would love this book?

If you're a history, trivia, or sociology lover, you will love this book. If you're someone who's engaged and wants to learn a ton about the institution into which you're entering, you may want to read this book. If you're engaged and you really don't want your starry eyed balloon dreams of marriage to be punctured by reality, don't read this. :)

Warning: this book is very academic in nature and quite dense. Though it does generally use colloquial language and you by no means need to be a college graduate to read it, we are talking 315 pages of probably size 10 font text. I really loved this book and it still took me a few weeks to get through. That being said, it really has informed my understanding of marriage thoroughly. I could write hundreds of posts using this book as a resource. I'm resisting the urge to do so (although you may get "tens" of posts instead).

My Favorite Parts

Is it possible to say that the entire book is my favorite? I've only had my copy for about a month and it's already lovingly bedraggled, filled with folded pages and highlights. Even writing this brief review has taken far longer than it should because in flipping back and forth trying to find my favorite parts, I've become reabsorbed in its pages and taken a few detours to write more blog posts on its contents and schedule them for the future. To be fair, I do have ADD and am very good at losing my train of thought and getting distracted by shiny things (thus, why I'm currently working in a Starbucks to try to get away from all the distractions at home), but this book is still insanely fascinating.

I do think the part of the book that has had the most impact on me is the emphasis on the economic nature of marriage. In the middle ages and Renaissance it wasn't seen so much as the entree into adulthood as something you entered in only after you had some economic steadiness. Some women even had to work to fund their own dowries. As a result, it was common for peasants to get married fairly late in life. Sometimes these marriages were even put off until after the female partner bore a child, so that her fertility and ability to provide future employees in the form of children was assured. Once married, the couple worked as partners together to make their household and prosper; women did tend to work out of the home (although honestly, the majority of men did too, until the industrial revolution), but the amount of work needed to run a household and perform necessary economic tasks like spinning, sewing, cooking, etc. meant that these contributions were quite valued. It was only in the Victorian ages and after that the concept of the "traditional male breadwinner" marriage really came about and women's work at home became devalued (Sidenote: SO much of what we consider "traditional" about marriage has existed for less than 200 years. SOOO MUCH. Honestly if you think it's a very old tradition, it's almost certainly not.). 

The two entirely different chapters on marriage in medieval times - among nobility and among "the other 95 percent" - really offer an interesting look at how different these groups' goals and priorities were. It's also very enjoyable to read some of the discussion of the place of same-sex marriage in America at the time of this book's publication in 2005 and realize how far we've come now that it's legal nationwide. :)

Does it talk about marital surname changes at all? 

Aside from a brief mention of Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell which doesn't even discuss her decision to keep her own name, no. 

Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/Marriage-History-How-Love-Conquered/dp/014303667X

#WeddingHashtagsAreAwesome (But I Can't Have One Because #JohnWillDivorceMe)

I really, truly love puns to the bottom of my being. They're one of my favorite things. Because of this, I love the heck out of wedding hashtags and would love to have one (in fact the idea of getting to come up with a wedding hashtag about taking his last name is so entertaining to me that that is actually a point in that option's favor), but.....John? Not so much. The following conversation has actually happened:

Me: "If anyone ever calls me 'Mr. John LastName' I will divorce you on the spot."  (this is a whole 'nother issue that will be discussed in a future post)

John: "If anyone uses a hashtag for our wedding, I will divorce you on the spot." 

We were both kidding, but also were pretty serious about our strong objections to both things. So. There you go. I suppose we're not having a wedding hashtag. However, they are pretty interesting, so I'm going to talk about them anyway.

"Ace of Hashtags" by Roberta Cortese (satyrika on Flickr), used under a Creative Commons License. https://www.flickr.com/photos/satyrika/8093127848

The Origins of Hashtags

The symbol itself - formally known as the Octothorpe but also called a number sign or pound sign, dates back to ancient Roman times. A New Yorker article called "The Ancient Roots of Punctuation" states:

"The story of the hashtag begins sometime around the fourteenth century, with the introduction of the Latin abbreviation “lb,” for the Roman term libra pondo, or 'pound weight.' Like many standard abbreviations of that period, “lb” was written with the addition of a horizontal bar, known as a tittle, or tilde... And though printers commonly cast this barred abbreviation as a single character, it was the rushed pens of scribes that eventually produced the symbol’s modern form: hurriedly dashed off again and again, the barred “lb” mutated into the abstract #... Though it is now referred to by a number of different names—“hash mark,” 'number sign,' and even 'octothorpe,' a jokey appellation coined by engineers working on the Touch-Tone telephone keypad—the phrase “pound sign” can be traced to the symbol’s ancient origins. For just as 'lb' came from libra, so the word 'pound' is descended from pondo, making the # a descendent of the Roman term libra pondo in both name and appearance."

The specific use of the symbol in a recognizable "hashtag" way is a lot older than you might think! A Lifewire article on the topic noted: "The metadata tags have been actually been around for quite some time, first being used in 1988 on a platform known as Internet Relay Chat or IRC. They were used much then as they are today, for grouping messages, images, content, and video into categories. The purpose of course, is so users can simply search hashtags and get all the relevant content associated with them." According to Lifewire, a resident of San Diego started using the hashtag #sandiegofire on Twitter (which launched July 15, 2006) to inform people about the ongoing wildfires in August 2007; other articles indicate that the first suggestion of # as a tracking tool to Twitter came from Chris Messina. This blog post by Stowe Boyd is believed to be the first one to actually coin the term "hashtag."

You can now use hashtags to track or group posts on a common theme on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest. I'll admit that I mostly use them sarcastically (as in the above headline or in my commonly used #blessed), but I do actually use them on my personal Instagram to track my ongoing photo chronicling of all my nail polish shades via #naileditproject (however, you'd have to be friends with me to see those, so it's really for my own personal use rather than to commune with others).

"Hashtag Coffee #coffeelover" by DoSchu on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons License. - https://www.flickr.com/photos/doschu/28908948920/

Here Comes the Hashtag

Buzzfeed attempted to track down the first people to use a wedding hashtag, and concluded from researching old twitter posts from June 2008 that it was a man named Jon Bohlinger. A few more mentions were made of the trend in 2008, then it started taking off more in 2009. A Pinterest spokesperson told them that there was a more than 800% increase in pins featuring "wedding hashtag" on their site between July 2015 and July 2015.   

I used this blog as an excuse to reach out to Ariel Meadow Stallings, the publisher of one of my favorite websites, OffbeatBride.com. She said she first started really seeing wedding hashtags back in 2013, first with Twitter (pointing me to http://offbeatbride.com/seattle-boathouse-wedding/  as an example) and then with Instagram (http://offbeatbride.com/wedding-instagram-hashtag/).

If you can't come up with your own brilliant hashtag, there are a million wedding hashtag generators out there now (according to weddinghashtagwall I could use - #RachaelLovesJohn #AdventuresofRJ or my fave #DicksonandLorenzenMerger, or ooo since we're both lawyers we could be #DicksonLorenzenLLP BUT I WON'T BECAUSE JOHN IS A GRUMP*). Someone even started a business creating custom wedding hashtags for people. Offbeat Bride has a fantastic article talking about ways to come up with more unique hashtags that incorporate those awesome puns I was talking about earlier.

They really are a pretty powerful tool at this point - Several websites exist now to track hashtags and provide you with various analytics on them. I just used keyhole.co to search #weddinghashtag and got the following results for the past two weeks - 69 posts with 55 users using it, reaching 160 unique users. If you're keen on conglomerating your posts leading up to your wedding and all your guests' posts and pictures in one place, using a hashtag and a service like this would help you pull from all the various websites your guests might post on. 

Also, just for your entertainment, this article "Best Wedding Hashtags Ever" from Brides.com is pretty hilarious. <3

*Actual photo of my fiancé.  

I do not own this photo. Please don't sue me.