When I was small I used to love to pull mail out of the slot in the front door, bring it to the dining room table, and place it in a neat pile there. I felt as though I was doing something important for the family. After all, there were gas bills and grocery store flyers and, once a year, Dad’s new license plates — all vital missives and packages from big locations in the city and even other states. Just carrying and arranging them made me feel as though I was helping my parents keep up with the demands of the enormous outside world.
The vast majority of mail was addressed to Mr. Joseph J. Glab, 1621 N. Natchez Ave., Chicago, 35, Ill. I’m harkening back to the days before Zip Codes, when, for example, 35 was our “zone number.” Not only that, our state abbreviation was a three-letter thing as opposed to today’s USPS two-letter designation. Things change.
Every once in a great while a letter would come for Mrs. Joseph J. Glab. The first time I saw that, I figured the sender had misspelled Mr. Dad wasn’t a woman! “Hey Ma, look at this,” I called out, bringing the letter to her in the kitchen, figuring she’d get a kick out of the error. She glanced at the envelope and said, “Yeah, that’s for me.”
“For you?” I said. “But they put Dad’s name down.”
She explained that that was the rule. A woman was addressed by her husband’s name.
I walked away, puzzled. I couldn’t figure out why Ma would be called Dad’s name. Or why any woman would be called by her husband’s name, for that matter. I was six or so years old and just beginning to realize not all that much makes any damned sense in this crazy world. Things have changed. Sort of.
Here we are, nearly 75 years after the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. More than 50 years after Women’s Lib became a thing. Forty years since the first woman Supreme Court Justice was named. Women run major countries and chair boards of directors. Are mayors and governors. Police officers, firefighters, managers, airline pilots, astronauts. Hell, a woman won the popular vote in the 2016 US presidential election. A woman today serves as our nation’s vice president.
No one would ever think to send a letter to The Loved One addressed to Mrs. Michael G. Glab.
Still, I’m puzzled.
Despite all the advances women have made in my lifetime — they can’t be fired for being pregnant, they can have credit cards and get home loans, they can run down to the CVS and buy contraceptives even if they’re not married, they can raise hell if co-workers pat them on the ass; things they couldn’t do in 1962 or even ’72 — tons of women get married these days and take their husbands’ surnames.
The practice of a woman changing her last name to her husband’s goes back more than a thousand years, acc’d’g to The History Behind Maiden vs. Married Names on the Minnesota Bride website. Before that, surnames didn’t matter all that much. Under English common law, the page reads, a female’s entire existence was defined by “coverture.” That is, she was “covered” either by her daddy-o or her husband. The law held that “women had no legal identity apart from their spouse.”
The US Supreme Court scoffed at the notion as far back as 1966 when it ruled in United States v. Yazell that a wife was not necessarily responsible for her husband’s debts. Justice Abe Fortas wrote that the “quaint doctrine” of coverture was “peculiar and obsolete.”
In these days of nearly fetishistic concern for identity and individual specialness, young women in droves continue to take their husbands’ surnames. They become, in essence, Mrs. HUSBAND”S NAME HERE.
As I said above, I remain puzzled. Women choose their friends, their lovers, their political party, their gender, their career, their marital status, their motherhood, their tribe. Helen Reddy famously sang in 1972 “I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman.” Yet 52 years later women continue to say, in practice, I am his.
I’ve been asking women, both married and not, why for a while now. I’ve asked women who’ve taken their husbands’ names and women who aren’t yet married what they’ll do when the time comes. I’ve asked young women and old. Funny thing is, the most common response I get is the tilted head and a bemused, “Hmm?”
Truth is, my unscientific study has found, most women are as puzzled about the whole thing as I am.
Which is baffling considering a woman who gets married and chooses to retain her birth name doesn’t have to do a darned thing. Whereas a newlywed who wants to take her husband’s name must get a new drivers license, Social Security card, credit card, and passport. She must change the name on her savings and checking accounts and her mortgage. She must jump through hoops to adopt her new surname. It’s a huge pain in her ass.
I asked one newly married woman why she chose her husband’s last name. “I’m proud to be part of his family,” she said. This brings us to an uncomfortable reality, that some women have suffered childhood traumas — abuses, say — and are more than happy to shed a surname that represents painful memories. But that can’t account for all the women who continue to honor that “peculiar and obsolete” custom.
Let’s just call it inertia. People who no longer go to church still celebrate Christmas. A lot of Jews and Muslims still shun shellfish and pork. Some men still open doors for women. Hell, in some states even the wedding ceremony itself is outdated — all a couple has to do to make their union legal is sign their marriage license. And women have been taking their husbands’ last names for a thousand years.
People say, that’s the way it’s always been done. So they do it.
But, jeez, people — it’s your name.
I went by my maiden (ha) name which was actually my father’s name, which means I don’t really have my own last name, at first.
After my son was born I decided to add my husband’s name to mine because I wanted to be part of the same family. I did chafe at being asked how the [first and last name of my husband’s] family was.