Certainly there’s a long tradition of wives taking their husbands’ last names, and a growing tradition of wives keeping their birth names. A couple in California found out that bucking…
Certainly there’s a long tradition of wives taking their husbands’ last names, and a growing tradition of wives keeping their birth names. A couple in California found out that bucking tradition in a straightforward fashion was going to be costly.
A couple of years later, when Buday, 29, proposed marriage whileon a backpacking trip, Bijon reminded him about their previous conversation. “I said, ‘Remember we talked about names? Are you really going to take my last name?'”
Buday, unfazed, said yes. “It was,” he said, “not a big deal.”
Not until he actually tried to take his fiancee’s last name.
On the marriage license application, which now costs $70 to file in L.A. County, Bijon could simply fill in her last name or her soon-to-be husband’s last name.
But if Buday wanted to become a Bijon, he would have to get an order of the court to do so — and not before he had filed a petition, paid $320, advertised public notice of his intention to change his name for four weeks in a local newspaper and then appeared before a judge.
“It strikes both of us — especially me — that this is not on equal ground,” said Buday, now married to Bijon for more than a year but reduced to still using his, well, maiden name. “This is about gender equality.”
Which is what the ACLU thought.
This isn’t just a California thing:
Only six states recognize a statutory right for men to take their wives’ last name. They are: Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York, and North Dakota. No data exists on how common the practice is.
In recent years, many couples have chosen to combine their last names or take hyphenated names. For instance, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was born Antonio Villar, and his wife Corina Raigosa. They combined their names when they were married in 1987. The six states that allow men to take their wives’ last name on the marriage application also allow couples to combine their last names (with a hyphen or without).
In other words, California (et al.) take any sort of name change at marriage time to be the same as a name change at any other time, requiring certain processes and safeguards to protect from fraud, etc. Except if it’s the wife taking the husband’s name, in which case, well, fine, that’s a freebie.
Yeah, that’s not right. As we are not in a society that can assume that wives will take their husbands’ names (even if most of them do), it does need to be handled equitably. Either everyone gets a pass for a “life event” like that, or nobody does.
I never felt any great compulsion for Margie to take my family name — if she had, that would have been fine (and simpler in some ways), but I didn’t take it as an affront that she didn’t (and neither did my family, so far as I know). She goes by either last name, socially — and, heck, I’ve been called David Kleerup more than once.
For those folks who want to do the name changing thing, more power to them — it’s an increasing hassle in this era of databases and such to make sure it happens everywhere, but it also makes life simpler in the long run. And for some folks it is a statement of solidarity and commitment.
But women are not chattel, and the assumption that a woman will take her husband’s name — or that a husband would never dream of so demeaning himself as to take his wife’s name — is a relic of the past. If we’re going to allow it in one case, we need to do so in an even-handed fashion for the other.
