Feminist traitor here

When I got married recently, at the now-oh-so-young-sounding age of 27, I opted to change my name. My husband expressed no opinion either way, and my mother as well as some friends, as well as one especially opinionated bank employee, objected. It sounds like something very much not done in academia, yet in my (ambitious, I promise) cohort, there's one changed name and one soon-to-change. In other words, no one made me do it, nor was I under overwhelming pressure not to do so.

It's true enough that for women who consider themselves feminists - and I consider myself one - there's no way to explain why you went this route without coming across as defensive at best, hypocritical at worst. But the same is true of everything to do with weddings and marriage - every attempt at a run-down of how a decision (getting legally married to a man, wearing a white dress, wearing an engagement ring, having a big party) was made comes across as, the woman is clearly dealing with two conflicted selves, the Good Feminist and the Closet Bridezilla, and clearly the latter self won out.

For just this reason, my approach thus far has been to not care what others think about it, and thus not to offer explanations. I know my reasons. But in the interest of providing Flavia with another data point, and now that this decision's behind me (so no one thinks I'm putting my name up for bloggy debate), let's all know my reasons:

I wanted to. That was the main reason. So the reasons below are more like why I didn't not want to.

Career-stage, of course, matters, and ancient as I may be, I'm still a student. Whether or not I end up in academia - and that's still the plan - many people I will meet in the course of my career will not even know which name I started out with. As for my other life as a blogger, I generally just go by my first name anyway. If tragedy of tragedies, not knowing my original last name keeps some Googlers away from my Chicago Maroon archives, so be it, but I will use maiden-as-middle for all subsequent writing in which my last name is necessary. But my first name's uncommon enough that I'm still easy enough to track down, but my Facebook and Google+ (is this going to stick?) identities include both names. (Oh, and my name is Google-unique in any of the permutations.) Like Flavia said, women who've "changed" their names kind of end up with this these days by default, even if the court procedure to get the maiden-as-middle officially tagged on (thanks a bunch, New York, for allowing only hyphenation) is too much of a hassle. I suspect this is true even for women who opt to keep their names, that they'll end up getting this lineup of names and having to correct people, the way a straightforward name-swap used to be assumed. At any rate, if your great fear is invisibility, Facebook will take care of that and then some. Friends from middle school won't lose track of you.

Like I said, I consider myself a feminist. And I do see how, given that feminism is largely about rejecting the notion that the most important point in a woman's life - but not a man's - is marriage, anything that reinforces the idea that marriage is a bigger deal for the wife than it is for the husband is - as we say in such discussions - problematic. I also get that saying that there's no problem as long as each woman has a choice isn't sufficient, because the same could be said of dieting unnecessarily or getting loads of cosmetic surgery "for yourself," when even if no law orders this, women often do so because they don't think they have the option of not doing so. For these reasons, I wouldn't claim that it's as feminist to change your name as to keep it. As for whether I lose sleep over this, I suppose I've lost more metaphorical sleep over being a Zionist but not living in Israel. As inconsistencies in my life go, this is a minor one. If you want to get me on the defensive, ask me how I could find Herzl so convincing, yet be typing this in New York.

On that note, my main qualms about name-change were unrelated to feminism. I think if my maiden name had been really identifiably Jewish, I might have felt some political need to hang onto it. But... not so much, Ellis Island took care of that, leaving something vaguely German-sounding in place of the much-cooler Muczadski (among so many possible spellings). Meanwhile, my new name is... actually kind of awesome for someone who studies 19th C French literature, especially when paired with "Madame." This is, I realize, a Francophilic-Zionistic aside of relevance to probably no one else, ever.

But to return to the more general-interest feminist angle, changing my name didn't feel terribly inconsistent to me. Feminism in my own life means earning money and having a career. It means my husband and I both do chores. It means - and this one I'll accept is a bit outside the typical feminist list - having chosen a spouse in part on the basis of looks, and not apologizing for that. It also means not spending excessive amounts of time or energy (and this is of course subjective) fussing about my own looks, in particular not engaging in weight-think. Oh, and birth control was a good invention. These are the first-world, day-to-day feminist issues that I've come to see as important. My new last name has yet to cause me to get one taco rather than two if it's two I want (and it's two I want). By the end of the week, the relevant bureaucracy should be in order, meaning that come the fall, when I'm on fellowship again, neither the paycheck nor the work-itself aspects will be affected. And, again, I suspect it's not going to destroy my career in French that I now have a French last name.

What feminism hasn't meant, for me, is wheel-reinvention. In other words, I do not lose sleep over the fact that I do not defy gender norms in all areas. I recognize that it's convenient to say the least to identify as the gender you were born. I don't think that my relationship with my husband is something so complex and unique and snowflake-ish that the word "marriage" fails to describe it. I'm lucky that the kind of relationship I wanted is the one society wanted me to have. So the fact that wife-takes-husband's-name is how it generally goes was not in and of itself a reason, for me, to be suspicious of it.

One angle that's often forgotten is that if you keep your name, you're probably keeping your father's name, not your mother's, and any children you have will probably have your husband's name, not yours. My thinking here was, I'm not sticking it to the patriarchy all that much if I keep my father's name and give Theoretical Future Offspring (and poodles count) my husband's. Hyphenation, unless we-as-a-society figure out a new way, just seems like deferring the question to the next generation, often enough with a nicely hyphenated name being swapped for a husband's in due time. (Here, I've got some anecdata.) Part of why younger women may be more likely to change their names is the question of how feminist or not it will feel to have nobly rejected sharing a name with your new family. The younger you are, however professionally ambitious you are, the more likely kids are on the horizon. It's not necessarily about being a future SAHM or a professionally-unanchored ingenue marrying a much-older financier.

Then, setting aside the question of theoretical babies, there's the fact that, in an age of individual spousal choice, there's something to be said with picking a name that represents independence, a part of your life you made for yourself. (I bet there are some men who wish it were more socially acceptable to announce that kind of break with their childhoods.) This continues to be true even if - Marie, I'm getting to your comment - the marriage ends. It's still a record of a part of your life you chose.

And on that cheery note, there's something to be said for behaving in symbolic ways that make a statement about your confidence in your marriage's capacity to withstand the test of time. If you think marriage means, yay, now I don't need to work, now I can get super out-of-shape and stop all pre-existing grooming routines, then yes, you are screwing yourself over until the covenant-marriage types get their way. Now, I certainly don't think keeping your name is announcing that you're not confident in your marriage's future. It doesn't cut both ways. But I suspect that for me, as for other women whose marriages were preceded by a significant premarital monogamy-and-cohabitation stage with the now-husband-then-boyfriend, a name-change is a way of marking a difference between two things that don't really feel that different.