Marriage Name Wars

Matthew Yglesias, William of Baude and a trio of Butlers have posted on whether women should take their husbands' names upon marriage. I actually don't care one way or the other. Growing up in Quincy, women who didn't follow the traditional path stood out and were talked about, but even my more conservative friends in college at least considered what they would do, and I have been surprised a couple of times by the result.

Part of this attitude is because the terms of the debate really don't go back to the origins of the naming system. The American way of assigning surnames stemmed from a combination of urbanization in the late middle ages (how to tell John the Baker from John the Miller) and Norman record-keeping with respect to property rights and needing a word to call different descent groups. It was set up on a strictly utilitarian basis.

Other cultures developed different naming patterns. In Arabia, the key question was descent and figuring out who was related to whom and to what degree. Arab names thus tended to be very long, such as Masud b. Khalid b. Malik b. Ribi b. Sulma b. Jandal b. Nahshal b. Darim b. Malik b. Hanzalah b. Malik b. Zayd Manat b. Tamim (b = bin/ibn = son). In everyday use, they found it convenient to shorten things, so this man would often be referred to as just Masud b. Khalid al-Tamimi, with "Tamim" being his tribe. Eventually place would work as well as tribe, as in the historian Abd al-Qadir b. Umar al-Baghdadi. Today the patterns are the same, though usually without the "Ibn," and Arabs are frequently adopting Westernized practices by picking either an immediate father's name or the kinship or regional designation to become the family name. Thus, Saddam Hussein's father might have been named Hussein, and he just named his kids Uday and Qusay Hussein rather than Uday and Qusay Saddam.

Back to the main point, in this system there is no provision for women taking a husband's name, though Yasser Arafat's wife is Suha Arafat, probably a sign of Western influence on the elites. Names are about ancestry and origin, not a means of defining a bounded entity for the purpose of property rights. Which is why today, I think people should do whatever works best for them. The institution of the family will not collapse if not all members share the same surname, just like people who take a spouse's name are not giving up their identity because they wish to base it on the family they are producing rather than the one from which they sprung.

The remains of past gender bias in the property rights system could be removed if couples simply began taking a new name upon marriage. For example, If I got married in May and my wife and I wanted to honor the creation of something new, we could call ourselves Mr. and Mrs. Spring, or if we believed strongly in certain values we could be Mr. and Mrs. Compassion. Although that sounds weird, it would be true in some ways to the origins of naming. I admit I don't think I could actually do that, though - I much prefer to have my family life blend into the established options of whatever culture I find myself in and simply wish other people well when they decide to become reformers. Such a name, of course, would work for only one generation, and people who are really into family connections would hate it.

Bottom line? This really doesn't matter much. My wife will do what she wants. Other people will do what they want. Too much else goes into the status of women's rights and family life for names to be much more than a symbol, albeit one many will decide is important to them.