It might be because I'm a Smith College graduate that Stiles thinks I have a feminist voice to express. After all, Smith birthed both Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. Or maybe he just thinks I have feminist tendencies. After all, I kept my "maiden" name when I married. He continues to crow about the pun above because he came up with it. It has worn me down. I'm not prepared for an intellectual, or even intelligent discourse about feminism, so we'll just have some fun. (By the way, the clue to the pun is that my last name is Wilson, while my husband's is Lawson.)
I don't particularly think of myself as a feminist. Afterall--shh, don't tell anyone--I never quite finished reading "The Feminist Mystique." Of course, the damn book is 417 pages long. Not including 25 pages of endnotes. (And yes, it was prescribed reading in more than one of my college courses.) Frankly, I came of age in the late '80's and I pretty much figured the Equal Rights Movement and the path paved by that generation of women had solved the issue of equality. I didn't have to prove I was equal to men. I simply knew I was. I still know I am.
The moral values I hold about equality and rights I have always referred to as humanist, because I believe they apply to society in its entirety, not just any segment of it. Here are a few examples of my political ideology on this topic. I believe in equal pay for equal work. I believe in family leave. In fact I think it should be mandatory for women and men if they decide to have kids. I think we should be able to count our parents as dependents on our taxes when they become that. I believe that everyone, including men, the rich, and the powerful, should have to wash their own dishes and clean their own toilets occasionally. That way we'd all remember that we're basically the same as everyone else.
If the truth be known, there's another reason to be a humanist rather than a feminist. The feminist label is similar to the environmentalist label. Dirty, nasty words. Or, more eruditely expressed, for better or worse, these words carry a negative connotation in today's society. We were certainly aware of it during my years at Smith. You might think it was (is) one of the bastions of feminism, but there was actually quite a continuum of belief on the subject.
To my shock there were many women enrolled who--this is just 10 years ago--intended to marry right out of college and not work. Their Smith diploma was another addition to their pedigree. I think their lips curled in distaste at the mere thought of feminism. We also had our the hard-core, serious, feminist, P.C., watchdogs at Smith. They were fairly intimidating, for you were bound to offend someone whenever you opened your mouth. The rest of us fell somewhere in between those two extremes and didn't think inequality was still such a big issue. On the other hand we were living in, and learning from, an institution that prized and valued women. It existed for women. No wonder we didn't think equality problems existed. For certain friends, there were rude awakenings awaiting after they left Smith, depending upon their chosen career paths.
At any rate, whatever I consider myself, most people probably would call me a feminist. Whether that is because of my beliefs, or simply because I kept my last name depends on their values. I don't consider name retention to be a radical statement, but some people would take issue with that.
I was 27 when I married. No spring chicken in these stomping grounds. Any well-bred, well-adjusted young Utah woman would have married long before then and delivered, oh, let me do some quick math, anywhere from 5-7 children prior to reaching that age. It's one area where I don't mind being a late bloomer. Anyway, by the time I was ready to jump on the marriage bandwagon I was pretty used to being Anne Wilson. It's who I am. Keeping my name wasn't really a statement of anything, except perhaps stubbornness. After all, why should I have to change my name? I considered hyphenating, but Wilson-Lawson has no resonance of any kind. In fact, it just sounds stupid.
At one point Peter jokingly suggested that we combine our respective last names into a new one. We could use the first three letters of his last name and the last three letters of mine. I, in turn, proposed we try it the other way...I'm sure you get the picture. In the end, we decided that "to each his (or her) own" would be the best solution. And so Anne Wilson I remained.
Unthinkable as it is, our society in the year 2000 continues to operate for the most part on the premise that when a man and a woman marry, the woman will take the man's surname. End of story. This means that the small act of keeping your name in this country adds certain minor complications to your life.
I didn't anticipate any of these inconveniences. The only dilemma I could imagine involved monograms, which just didn't seem that critical. Traditionally a woman comes to a marriage with her dowry linens monogrammed with her maiden name initials. After marriage, she uses her married initials. When possessed with the desire to monogram I will simply (and properly, I might add) use my "maiden monogram". With any luck, Peter will think of me as a maiden forever. The delicate issue of monogramming aside, I have discovered other inconveniences in the five years of our marriage.
The most annoying one is that we always receive mail order catalogues in multiple combinations of both of our last and first names. (e.g., Anne Wilson, Anne Lawson, Peter Lawson, Peter Wilson). They come addressed to us individually, as a couple, and in different spellings of our names. If I start multiplying those possibilities, I can see that keeping my name actually makes a significant contribution to deforestation on a global scale. (You should never let the truth stand in the way of a good story, but in reality I think the largest number of catalogues I ever received at once from any one company, was six. Still.)
I've also found that if your spouse carries your health insurance coverage, the company sometimes has trouble figuring out who you are and to whom you "belong". Plus, I always worry that if something happens to me, no one will be able to figure out who my next of kin is. Hopefully, the E.R. would find my insurance card before they go flipping through my address book.
A recently discovered inconvenience is that when you go to Mexico with your husband and his kids, you have to have a certified letter from the last wife stating that it is okay for the kids to travel with you. For some reason, the equation of a man and his children plus a woman with a different last name equals an abduction profile. And here I thought I was too bland and nondescript to ever be profiled.
There are a myriad of glitches in social situations. For example, take the party where most people are, say, acquaintances of your husband's family. Your husband, being a smart man, knows to introduce you using both your first and last name (the correct way to do this is actually addressed in several etiquette books). Despite this, if you call these people at a later date they have no idea who you are until you add the caveat, "I am so-and-so's wife". Sometimes I even give up and say, "Lawson. This is Anne Lawson." "Oh," they say, in a tone that ever so slightly conveys, "You're one of those women", or "Why didn't you just say so in the first place?"
Of course, one of the biggest issues is that when you decide to marry, you have to tell your family you are keeping your name. I would have had no worries had my parents been living. However, both my parents were dead, which was one of the reasons I remained a Wilson. I got to tell my grandfather instead, which is another story. My grandfather is very...well, the adjectives proper and traditional begin to paint an accurate picture.
The day before my wedding my grandfather begins crafting the marriage announcement for publication in various newspapers. He gets to the end where he reads aloud, "Mr. and Mrs. Lawson will make their home on Professor Valley Ranch, outside of Moab, Utah." He's very proud. "Uh, Grandpa?" I say, my voice wavering just the tiniest bit.
Something hit the proverbial fan when he discovered I was not becoming Mrs. Lawson. Basically it came down to the fact that he thought I was dishonoring Peter, who luckily enough, (and through no wile of his own) managed to be absent during the fray. I prevailed, but was close to tears for the entire day.
The story gets better. My aunt kept her name when she married in 1977. Talk about breaking new ground. I knew nothing at the time, but apparently you would have thought she was Elizabeth Cady Stanton. During her five year marriage, whenever she received a letter from my grandfather it was addressed, without fail, to Mrs. Elizabeth Lojeski (her husband's last name). Twenty years later, when my grandfather writes me, he addresses the letter to Ms. Anne Wilson. (Or to Ms. Anne Wilson and Mr. Peter Lawson when he writes both of us.) Not only Wilson, but Ms. What a guy. I cannot tell you what that means to me.
I think what I find surprising is that more women today do not keep their own names when they marry. Half of my close friends from Smith have married and only two of us kept our own names. I know of no high school friends who retained their maiden names. During the time I worked as a paralegal in tax and estate planning, I came across more than a dozen Mormon families in which the daughters had not even been christened with a middle name...because when they married, their last name would become their middle name.
There is only one thing I find disappointing about staying Anne Wilson. It is that there are times when I find myself apologizing because someone else is confused about my marital status or who my spouse is. "It's hard to keep track these days," I say, placatingly. Well, damn it, it's not something I need to apologize for. We all ask for first names when the need arises. It's just not that hard to get into the habit of asking for last names. If Miss Manners has dealt with it, the rest of us can too.
In the end, it's important to remember the benefits of keeping your own name. There is the innate statement of autonomy and individuality. There are also some that are more frivolous, but nonetheless worth mentioning. For example, when you check into a motel in a rural locale, the clerks often assume you're having an affair. You're free to play this up if you think your marriage needs a little excitement. However, for me the very, very, best benefit is that when telemarketers call and ask for Mrs. Lawson I can, in all truthfulness say, "No one by that name lives here."
Ms. Wilson, who exhibits numerous forms of retention, is a regular contributor to The Zephyr.