4 Comments
⭠ Return to thread

It’s absolutely mind boggling how women’s identity, separate from mens, goes back to the beginning of time, it feels like. Because when a baby girl in a Western, Judeo-Christian based society/culture is born, she automatically has her father’s last name. Were the women ever separated from the men??? We are the daughters of our fathers. Our society is so totally based in patriarchy. If I were to adopt my own name, I’d be Mitzi WideOpenHeartedSongstress*. Get rid of all the men’s names. My sons would think I’d flown off the handle- which is also scary to men I guess, because there’s the image of the witch, right there.

It’s hard to live on this planet.

* And if anyone needs proof of the wideopenheartedsongstress part, you can find me under my married name, Mitzi Schwarz, on Spotify 🥰

Expand full comment

You can read about how Prince Philip tried to get Queen Elizabeth to be a member of the "House of Mountbatten". He was furious that every other man in the U.K. got to put his name on the family and he had to be a Windsor. But eventually he came to terms with it. Some societies do better than others on this, but it shouldn't take a royal ruling to keep one's birth name. Hilary had to stop being a Rodham to help Bill, and that might have politically driven, but it certainly wasn't right.

Expand full comment

I, personally, like the Scandinavia tradition of daughters taking their mother's first name as surname and sons taking their father's. So, the son of Eric takes Ericsson as his surname and Ingrid's daughter takes Ingridsdottir as her last name.

In an age where nearly everyone has their own personal cell phone number, that we just be named by that number. ;) That would certainly minimize systemic and institutional racism, no doubt.

Expand full comment

Yes, I saw that in Iceland and it is a good idea, though would be far more complicated in our much larger and far more diverse population where genealogy records don’t go back nearly as far. But there are a lot of alternatives that people do, such as combining or inventing new family names. All of these seem like good ways of getting around racist “tags”. This reminds me a bit of an old MAD magazine page where people are identified solely by numbers (one person was hyphenated by the Queen) but criminals are given names instead!

Expand full comment