I woke up thinking I had been dreaming about pregnant animals today. It may have been pigs..but thankfully it was one of those dreams that dissolved nearly before I could get my eyes open. I also woke up in the middle of the night not being able to figure out where I was sleeping and where exactly the bedroom door was. Haven’t had those kind of unnerving thoughts since I worked thru the pain of my dad dying back in the early 2000’s. I think it has to do with the incredible amount of things on my mind and I can’t seem to close any of the doors…it has put me quite out of sorts during the awake part of my days too. It irritated me the way he opened the garage door last night…are you with me here.
@Skanickadee got the wheels turning this morning with her blog on marriage name changing. She is very traditional and a realist and her way often grounds me when I’m on a tangent. She brought up the topic of women changing their last name when they marry. This has been probably the biggest feminist issue with me of all time…well, that and gender equality and same pay issues and my lack of desire to stay barefoot, pregnant in the kitchen…If I had it to do all over again…I would not have changed my last name. I think it is utterly ridiculous that women have to change their name. THEIR NAME! Their identity. I remember when I was younger…okay…more recently too. ..the discussion about if so-and-so doesn’t have a boy, the name will die off with this generation…in fact @Tracy mentioned that this morning also. WHAT. We need boys? It only puts another check in the blue column of why girls are second class citizens right from birth. Hyphenated names – makes the most sense….but…I wish there were more sides to this coin..because daily, I deal with hyphenated names…first generation – great..but what happens when the girl marries…to stick with my take on it – if Green-Brown is my daughter’s maiden name, does she hyphenate again? Because using my theory…Green-Brown is her name – her identity – her heritage…dropping one of her last names to hyphenate with another name just presents the same problem? Theoretically – it could go on and on and on and that would be stupid and inconvenient the first time you have to sign up for something with the government. The other argument…if you don’t take the husband’s name…what last name do the children use…if they use the father’s last name which is probably what would happen, then the mother has a different last name. So…like everything else..until a solution is found, I guess I will have to conform. Oh wait…I already did.
I have other opinions today, but I totally lost myself in the last paragraph…so
Until next time….
Ninasusan 
@Ninasusan – Yep, his last name is his father’s last name.
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@GoneRetired – absolutely…good point about husband changing name if it was that important!!! You gave your son your husband’s last name??
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Married 30+ years and it was NOT popular for a woman to keep the name given to her by her parents. Yes, using a hypen to combine names was popular (but not with me). I had been working and living on my own (job, my own apartment, utilities and security in my name) and just didnt feel I should have to change my name. NO ONE was happy about it. When son came along, I thought about it but didnt. When he was young, he didnt know or understand the difference and when he was old enough, he had no problems with it. I was always happy keeping my own name (offered hubby the chance to change his name to mine if it was REALLY so important for us to have the same name).
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@to_be_creative – !!!!
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When my sister got married (32 years ago), there was a lot of resistance from family friends for her choice to keep our name. By the time my other sister and I tied the not (25 and 23 years ago), nothing was said at all.A child hood friend recently got married for the second time. She was talking on Facebook about the name change thing. I suggested she did not have to change. She got all up in arms and said she did as it represented her union for life and the merging of lives, etc. I wanted to point out that this was her SECOND marriage. She’d changed her name for the first one and there was no “Happily Ever After.” But I let it go.The saddest thing I ever saw, though, was an obituary for a “Mrs. Joe Brown”. Nowhere in the obit did it ever mention even her first name. Her identity had been wiped out completely, even in death. And on that note, I do remember my mom once correcting someone who introduced her as “Mrs. John A Smith.” She said, I am “Freda Smith.” She was president of League of Women Voters for the region and lobbied for the ERA my entire childhood. I often wonder if she ever considered keeping her maiden name.
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@Ghog – “Coldic-Winterbottom” hahahahahaha – I would change that name!
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@Ghog – totally!!!
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I remember when I got married and had to change my name – I was sad, I really liked my last name. Also, my husband’s name is very difficult; few people pronounce it (or spell it) correctly, so it has been irritating for the last 37 years.
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I think we should be allowed to make up our own names. Names are used in this day in age just to allow the authorities to be able to keep track of us. It’s all about record keeping. There was a time when people’s names meant something. It also said something about your heritage and what tribe you belonged to. “Joshua” means “the Lord saves” and, interestingly, “Jesus” means the same thing in Greek. In those days, people did not have last names. If you were a woman in those days, there was not a last name to take. You were merely the property of your husband along with your children.Sometimes a name described your occupation. Jerry the Miller became Jerry Miller. John the Baker became John Baker. I think it was white Europeans that started to use last names and applied them to their wives who were still considered property. A family last name would be applied to towns. If there were enough Greens, the town would become Greenville and so on. I think I will be Ghog, the Burrowmaster or Groundhog Burrowmaster. Do you think I’ll get that past the judge? Naming conventions vary from culture to culture. Maybe we should just go back to one name for each person. The whole hyphenation thing is too bizarre. There was a woman in Iowa City with the last name of Coldic-Winterbottom. Way too much information there. The silliness has to stop somewhere.
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@Ninasusan – sorry for the errors! Point* have* not taken…
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@Jst4e – bravo
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I for one at this pint has not taken my husband last name. He is fine with it and until we have children I am not sure I am going to do so. I guess we will see if I conform… I don’t foresee it!
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I worked in a dental office a very long time ago and the last name thing was a huge issue. I wonder how it would be now with computer programs. Most software can’t deal with my two word first name so I wonder how it would handle a two word last name or a hyphenated last name. I would guess not very well. I know two people who gave both of their horribly long and difficult to pronounce last names to their poor daughter. I felt bad for the kid. It is a difficult question.
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@tracy – yes…
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I think it’s interesting that other cultures view this all very differently. Especially in Latin America.
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