Should you change your surname after you marry?
This was the point of our hotly debated editorial meeting today – riding on the equally hotly debated factoid of Bollywood actor Sonam Kapoor changing her surname, within hours of her marriage.
“Was hers a feminist choice?” one wondered, even as another countered with a “I think it’s chill”.
Read that question again – will you? Should you change your surname after you marry? Hand to your heart, are you even thinking of a man at the receiving end of this question? Can you imagine this being addressed to a guy, without the question being received with some amount of awkward laughter and a dismissive shake of the head or the hand?
We don’t ask men this question, because let’s be honest, it’s pretty much unthinkable.
Should Sonam Kapoor have changed her surname after marriage? I don’t think she should have, no. But then again, I’m not thinking of this in terms of Sonam as much as the innumerable Indian women getting married across the face of India every single day – as I write this and as you read this post. Here’s why:
Is the Choice to Take One’s Surname Really a Choice?
Think about it – what’s a choice? It’s about weighing and levelling against each other, for good measure, two equal and opposite halves of a debate, and then deciding where you stand. In the context of a woman, ‘choosing’ to keep her surname, can you really claim that both halves have ever been presented to her?
How many men have you heard of, who proudly stake claim to having changed their names too? How many men are inquisitively asked – as teenagers discussing matrimony, by their best buds; as grown men dating women, by their rishtedaars; as fiancé about to sign on the dotted line, at the registrar’s office, by said registrar – “Will you be taking your wife’s name, or keeping your own? Your own! That’s revolutionary, man!”
It is a rare, rare event in the Indian patrilineal ethos (NOTE: Not a matrilineal one) when a woman has made her ‘choice’, with BOTH considerations – “Hmm, now X number of men took their wife’s surname and Y number of women took their husband’s. I think I’ll go with X/Y.”
Till we’ve reached that place, I don’t think we can argue that this is a true, equal and informed choice.
What Does Taking Another’s Surname Mean?
Can we address the elephant in the room here, and talk about what adopting the surname of the man in your life really means? It’s a marker of your new identity, which is now inextricably linked with your husband’s – so much so that yours has been subsumed in the process.
It screams, “I belong to you, because society first told me I was a part of my husband’s property – and when at some point, in the last century, I protested and said, women shouldn’t be looked at as part of his movable assets, society told me it’s a marker of my love and affection for him”. It says, “As a woman, I need an owner”.
(A) Can we stop calling it an outpouring of a married woman’s affection, especially since the converse isn’t necessarily true OR prevalent?
And (B) the decision to take the husband’s name cannot be called a decision that is divorced from societal realities that women have been conditioned to believe.
Generations of women before us have grown up, seeing women conform, give in, losing their voices. So, I’m sorry, but when a woman ‘takes’ her husband’s name, she’s still conforming to the same value system. A value system that is disgustingly patriarchal.
But What About Her Father’s Name?
Yes, you could argue that when a married woman exercises her right to keep her ‘maiden name’, it isn’t really her own, but her father’s. Perhaps your parents were first-generation feminist themselves, and your mother chose to keep her own maiden name – which, you could still argue, is her father’s. And so on and so forth.
But that cycle’s gotta break somewhere, right? Two wrongs don’t make a right. Can it start with us? Here’s a feminist idea: Don’t conform and don’t adopt his surname. If you choose to have children, you could extend the ideology to them – give them a surname that has nothing to do with either of your families, OR, get really creative and come up with a new-fangled one, hatched by the two of you, to make it just yours!
Are you someone who finds this solution too far-fetched? Too much trouble, is it? SO much easier to just ask the woman to get the hell on with changing her name to her husband’s, no?
After all, what is with all this unnecessary fuss to dismantle an extremely patriarchal system that, if we tried to, we really could dismantle?
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