This article on the last name dilemma faced by married women has been popping up frequently in my Google alerts of late, as it makes its rounds through wire services and syndication and blogs. Two things made it noteworthy to me:
1) Written by Canadian Elsie Hambrook, chairperson of the New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women, it quotes a Canadian magazine survey as finding that 69 percent of prospective Canadian brides plan to take their husbands’ last names. Hambrook doesn’t say it straight out, but implies this is disappointing. But from south of the border, where a whopping 90 percent of married women adopt the Mrs. moniker, I find that heartening.
2) I like the part that is used in the pull quote. Of the last name choice, Hambrook says, “There are no rules without exceptions, no guidelines that are infallible. There is also no surrender without loss, no action without a message.” That second sentence was edited out of other versions I saw, and, as conversations with other women have revealed, it’s so true. When women give up part of their identity, they lose something.
In the interest of fairness, it’s true that something is also lost by not yielding to prevailing winds and taking a husband’s name. Every so often I get hit with a panic attack that the kids will, at some point in the future, get tagged as weird for our dual last names. (Tonight being one of those times, having just returned from a nametag function in which almost every pair of spouses I saw sported matching labels.) Then I get mad about the lack of good options that drove us to this situation. Which makes me resolve to broadcast our choice far and wide, (hence this blog post) in the hope that eventually it will spread to the point where it becomes a good option (one that doesn’t make people feel weird.) Then I’m happy again.