As this guy points out, it still seems pretty unheard of for men to take their wife's last name. Hyphenation seems a popular option, but the double-barreled names (while sometimes super awesome, especially in England) can be unwieldy and sometimes pretentious-sounding. At any rate, it's very much a short-term solution; is the next generation to use four? And the magic of doubling means it pretty quickly gets über-ridiculous. Sometimes a woman simply keeps her own name, and the children take either the father's or mother's name. Sometimes they split the children up by gender. Some people have other creative solutions: I had one friend with three children in the family, and three last names: father's (first husband), mother's, and father's (2nd husband).
I don't think any of it really gets to the heart of the problem, though. Even if a women keeps her "own" name, it's still just her father's name; you haven't escaped from what some find problematic about the old system, namely, that as the woman moves from her father's to her husband's household, she switches their names...as an object rather than agent. So what is to be done?
I quite like the Russian system of naming (maybe cause its orderedness would have ruled out the mess I've got when ID is necessary). There is a first, given name. Then there is a last, family name. And the middle name is a Patrynomic - based on the name of your father. Now, obviously, this doesn't solve any of the previous issues, as the family name comes from your father as well as the patrynomic...but it might give us a hint.
You could just switch the a matrynomic and a patryomic, and abandon the family name altogether. Or, you could have a sort of hybrid system:
Give each child a first (given) name. This is their actual name, that people will call them.
Children take their family name from their parents.
So children have two names.
When you get married, the couple chooses a new name to be their family name.
So they then have three names: Given name, parent's family name (as middle name), new family name.
When/if they have their own children, the children take the new family name, and their given names...and so on.
Obviously this has lots of problems: just off the top of my head, there's the loss of continuity (family names don't go down through the generations) and it obviously substantially privileges marriage which some people may not like. But given that the people for who this is an issue are ones who are torn between their progressive values and the charms of tradition, the latter may not be such an issue. And the former is sort of the problem expressed as a positive, as it stands the male line keeps the name through the ages and the female just disappears all the time.
Anyhoo, I don't expect that anyone would actually do this, but I kinda like it --> especially that it gives the opportunity to actively found a new family with a new identity.
Oh, and you could follow the Russian practice of identifying people by their first & second names in formal settings , so that you don't have a problem with names changing over a lifetime (i.e. your name since childhood stays your work name, even if you take a new family name).
P.S. Nobody freak out, I realise I'm the only one keeping my family name going and I have no intention to drop it...
1 comment:
Ah the burden of being the last male carrying the family name ... your solution is interesting. Geneology is going to be a much more difficult project in years to come. Then there is the example of your own family where no males in one generation meant your great great aunts got names like Henrietta, Roberta, Williamina ... but your great-grandmother was, in fact, given her mother's surname as her middle name - she was Annie McDonald Halliday - always known as Annie Mac - which I thought was kinda cool.
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