Names and the Choice Argument

By now I should no better than to add my voice to the chorus when the chorus is crying "but it's my CHOICE!" but I largely agree with Jill's Guardian piece/meme "Why should women change their names? Let the men change theirs." This is, I think, a little too simplistic:

Not that I'm unsympathetic to the women out there who have difficult or unfortunate last names. My last name is "Filipovic." People can't spell it or pronounce it, which is a liability when your job includes writing articles under your difficult-to-spell last name, and occasionally doing television or radio hits where the host cannot figure out what to call you. It's weird, and it's "ethnic," and it makes me way too easily Google-able. But Jill Filipovic is my name and my identity. Jill Smith is a different person.

I spent a good chunk of yesterday ruminating on names as the central part of one's identity, particularly when yours ties you to a culture that you never really felt a part of. I have my dad's "ethnic" last name, though I was never close to his family and subsequently their culture, even if it is an Americanized version. (Shorthand version: if you asked me to make "Sunday gravy," I'd make sausage gravy and probably smother chicken-fried steak in it. I would not make pasta sauce, which I only recently learned was "gravy" too.) But still, after 30+ years of having it, I can't see changing it.

As for choice feminism, Kate Harding  wrote something that better elucidates how one can be a feminist and still make anti-feminist choices, but this happens, it seems, weekly in the feminist blog world. (By the way, I'm typing this with silver halo tipped fingernails -- the scatter kind, not the linear, which I'm lemming badly. Not a feminist choice, not in the least.) Whatever the reasoning for taking the husband's name, it's still part of a larger, patriarchal system that puts the onus on women.