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Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including\u00a0<\/i>on Substack<\/i><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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This article is part of\u00a0<\/i>Upstream,<\/i><\/a>\u00a0The Daily Wire\u2019s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories \u2014 from our featured writers to you.<\/i><\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n About <\/span>80% of married women<\/span><\/a> in America still take their husbands\u2019 last names. Some, by simply dropping and replacing their maiden names. (I did this.) Others, by dropping their middle names and replacing those with their maiden names, and then adding the new last name. (This is quite popular among my friend set.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But this norm of a marital name change for women has long met with resistance from <\/span>some feminists<\/span><\/a>, who claim that marriage should not uniquely entail a woman\u2019s forfeiture of her \u201c<\/span>identity<\/span><\/a>.\u201d Why can\u2019t women just keep their names? Or, if sharing a name is an important aspect of an enduring marriage, <\/span>which some argue it is<\/span><\/a>, why can\u2019t the whole family take the woman\u2019s name instead of the man\u2019s?<\/span><\/p>\n In my view, these <\/span>questions themselves <\/span><\/i>\u2014 far more than any practice around last names \u2014 undermine the fundamental unity that is supposed to be marriage.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Here\u2019s what I mean: I have no problem with a woman legally retaining her last name after marriage for practical or professional reasons. I can quite easily imagine the circumstances in which I\u2019d have done so myself, had I gotten married later than I did<\/a> or with more professional accomplishments under my maiden name. And, obviously, there are cultures in which it is customary for women to retain their names after marriage, and even for men and women to take one another\u2019s names. None of this meets with any objection from me because I am not advocating for traditional Western naming practices <\/span>per se<\/span>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I am advocating for avoiding<\/span> the temptation to let incoherent ideological inclinations infect personal relationships, particularly the marital ones.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n To me, the crux of the surname debate is not surnames. It is the turning of marriage into a forum for identitarian self-expression, when it is supposed to transcend the self by definition, for women and men alike.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Name That Patriarchy\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n The primary objection to the norm of women\u2019s name changes upon marriage is that it rests on patriarchal foundations, the origins of which involve women having no individual rights and being essentially the property of their fathers before being transferred to their husbands. This is, of course, true, though I\u2019d argue it\u2019s not particularly relevant to today\u2019s brides. Relevant or not, however, the patriarchal origins of Western naming practices cannot be overcome by women retaining their maiden names.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A woman who keeps her own name rather than taking her husband\u2019s is almost always keeping her father\u2019s name. The patriarchal origins of said name are inescapable. So, the refusal to change a name on that score is futile.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n No one can change a distant past peopled by the long-dead. It\u2019s unclear why anyone would want to let said past burden her most sacred relationship in the here and now. More importantly, women who enter marriage with a \u201chis and mine, everything equal\u201d mindset, searching for <\/span>egalitarianism and androgyny<\/span><\/a>, are setting themselves up for disappointment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When Two Don\u2019t Become One<\/b><\/p>\n So much of today\u2019s discourse on dating and marriage <\/span>pits women and men against each other<\/span><\/a> over concerns that really amount to a false gendering of the human condition. Men complain about feeling undervalued by women; wives complain about \u201cthe mental load.\u201d Often, these accusations and our reactions to them take for granted that a war between the sexes is afoot, when in reality, many of these concerns simply reflect our shared humanity and its limitations.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Feeling undervalued and overwhelmed are not gendered experiences, but gendering them gives us an enemy to blame. That\u2019s more fun than admitting the truths at play. First, to be human is to exist within a fallen world shaped by our own fallenness; second, to be a husband or a wife is not to look for things to be an interchangeable 50\/50 but to accept that (if you\u2019re collectively doing what you ought), they\u2019ll be a likely non-interchangeable 100\/100. It\u2019s not that there\u2019s men\u2019s work and women\u2019s work; it\u2019s that there is work that each of you, as specific individuals, will be better at. Who is the man and who is the woman <\/span>will<\/span><\/i>, if you are honest, be a <\/span>factor<\/span><\/i> in determining who does what.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I would not want my son to marry a woman who wanted to keep her own last name rather than take his <\/span>for pseudo-feminist reasons specifically<\/span><\/i>. <\/span>That\u2019s not because I care about the name. <\/span>It\u2019s because I care about an adult relationship to reality, uncontaminated by a flimsily politicized lens that puts signaling some impotent blow against historical patriarchy ahead of signaling oneness with one\u2019s husband today.<\/span><\/p>\n Within marriage, there is exactly zero room for him vs. her; it should be him and her vs. the world.<\/span><\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including\u00a0<\/i>on Substack<\/i><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n