You are either for equality or you aren’t. Tradition doesn’t get a pass and is often the source of the problem.
Question for the men: Would you consider taking your wife's last name and naming the kids after her?
Saying “I’d never change my name–the idea repulses me and seems emasculating–but I expect my wife and kids to take mine” is pretty sexist, and “tradition” doesn’t give it a pass. Saying “I can’t imagine ever changing my name, and it’s up to my wife to decide whether or not she wants to change hers” is a reasonable position.
There are some things that were rooted in traditon that were inherently misogynostic and wrong. Others were just practical. I think of the name change thing as being of a practical nature.
I guess I’m not for equality. I wouldn’t change my last name (hyphen, maybe), but I don’t fault men who don’t want to change theirs.
Why would it have to be about that?
In times past, women automatically took their husband’s names. In these days, a woman’s name didn’t matter so much. For thousands of years, women expected to leave their family and become a part of their husband’s family in their teenage years. They didn’t ever spend a lot of time with their “maiden” name and were not really raised to be attached to it. Women also didn’t have much of a public or professional identity outside of their husband- hell, until not too long ago it was common for a woman to be referred to as Mrs. Husband’s Full Name in public. Our identity was our husband’s.
We started getting married later, working, living independently, and having our voices and desires being taken a bit more seriously. Around this time, some of us also started wanting to keep our names.
This happens for a variety of reasons, very few of which are related to sticking it to the man. Mostly, I think it’s about women who have become somewhat emotionally attached to the name they’ve been known by all their lives and not really interested in changing that part of their identity. In other situations, it’s not particularly helpful on a professional level to change your name at what is probably a high-stakes time in your career. If you have spent years building up your professional reputation under one name, how much damage could it do to suddenly change that to something completely different?
So now we have a choice- keep our name or change it. Personally, I’m not too fond of my last name, and I’m eager to shed it.
But shouldn’t men have that same option? If a guy is sick of being known as Mr. Butzburger, or whatever, shouldn’t he have the same opportunity to use marriage to get rid of it?
What a silly argument.
No-one, feminist or otherwise, is claiming that we should just make up last names out of whole cloth, or that we shouldn’t take them from our families. Everyone recognizes that names come from somewhere, and that there is a certain logic in passing names on through families.
The main points people are making is that a woman, simply by virtue of entering into a marriage contract, shouldn’t feel obliged to automatically give up the name that has served her well for her whole life, and that, while children do have to take someone’s name, there’s no compelling reason why the name they take must be that of the father.
Of course, you knew all that, as your lame “eeeeeevil male chauvinistic sexist patriarchal sexist chauvinist misogynist patriarchy” comment suggests. Feel better having got your insecurities off your chest?
No way. Tradition is tradition is tradition.
I take it you still sacrifice animals to the gods, as well? And beat your children? After all, tradition is tradition is tradition.
I will always operate professionally under the same name; I don’t want my publications to be under different names. Changing my name for other situations would be fine, I guess, but I don’t fancy operating under two different names and don’t see that happening.
I haven’t really thought about the children thing.
It amuses me to no end that some “men” are so insecure that they would find changing their name to be emasculating.
Another excellent point.
My wife and i got married while we were in grad school. Had she changed her name completely, her Bachelors and Masters degrees would have been under a different name than her PhD.
It’s possible, of course, to change one’s name for other things but keep the original name for professional purposes, but that seems like way too much trouble.
I have no problem with changing my name in theory. It all depends on whatever sounds the best. My name is very common and boring. It’s entirely possible I’ll end up with a non-related woman with the same last name, in which case, I think I’d hyphenate it because I think it sounds good doubled up; I’d become Jacob Brown-Brown.
Absolutely.
If my brother had changed his first lastname to match his wife’s, then it would sound like they’re cousins - ok, so her lastname is pretty common, but still… ewwww! I would like to think that any attempt to take both of her lastnames would have been rejected by the judge, as it would make it look like they’re siblings.
But given how much more weight her family has in their life than ours does, I think the only reason my nephews have the usual Spanish structure of Firstname Paternallastname Maternallastname instead of having her lastname before his is simply that my sister in law never considered the possibility. Before the kids were born, our side got invited to their house about once a year, despite living in the same town.
Actually, these days that can be a good thing.
My wife has an unusual last name, and a very unusual first-last combination. She likes her name, but one thing that sometimes annoys her is how easy it is to find her on the internet with simple search.
My name, by contrast, is very common, and Googling it without adding some specific terms will give you hundreds of results before you come across one related to me. I quite like that level of anonymity.
Gosh, you’re right. We should also give up Christmas because it relates to Baby Jesus and we’re all atheists on here.
I know a couple that already had the same last name when they married (no, they weren’t related). Problem solved.
It’s okay, because us liberated Doper Wimmins are giving him our opinion anyway. 
This will all be moot anyway, when we’re all identified by our UPC code tattooed on our foreheads and microchipped in our arms.
“Tradition” is a piss-poor justification for things because “tradition” doesn’t actually mean a single thing.
That label is only ever applied ex post facto, to things that we have decided to hold on to. So what we keep because it suits us is magically “tradition,” and the stuff that we drop because it’s irrelevant (like, say, yule logs) are just forgotten. In reality, no society has ever widely held on to a “tradition” that no longer suits their modern circumstances for more than a generation or so. We are all just making up our culture as we go along, picking and choosing as we wish. We can choose to call the things we keep “tradition”, but the reality is that we keep what works for us, not what is “traditional.”
Christmas is actually a pretty good example. Our Christmas is a messy mashup of pre-Christian winter festival traditions and a relatively somber minor Christian holiday, all molded into an entirely modern gift-giving feast whose iconography is derived from all over history, picking up everything from ancient Judaism to modern Coca Cola ads. My Christmas may somewhat resemble my mother’s Christmases. It doesn’t really represent my Grandmother’s Christmases, it’s nowhere even remotely related to my Great-Grandmother’s Christmases and if you go beyond that there is basically no relation at all. The fact is that I celebrate a modern holiday that happens to have some older roots, but Christmas as I celebrate it is no more “traditional” than Kwanzaa.
Unless you are prepared to argue that modern marriages are basically the same as marriages in our history, it’d kind of silly to argue to keep certain things a part of modern marriage because of “tradition.”
Is it Astley?
I’m a traditionalist. I would never take my wife’s name, nor would I name the kids after her. Before we got married, my fiancee and I thoroughly discussed the question of naming. I told her I’d be honored if she took my last name, but of course wouldn’t insist on it. Both of us had female relatives who’d found it bothersome to constantly have to explain that, although they kept their maiden names, they were, in fact, married, and their kid(s) really were their kids. For the sake of love, custom, tradition, history and convenience, she took my last name, and our three sons have my last name too. I don’t think any of us have ever regretted it.