I have been told that I was precocious as a child with strange ideas and interests nor considered normal in a child my age. I remember when I was about five years old, my aunt was getting married and I was given to understand that she would now change her name to that of her new husband, my soon to be Uncle Tom. I remember wondering how that happened.
The question in my childish brain was, how did the couple decide whose name they would take? I remember pondering this question for some time until the obvious answer occurred to me. Logically, the couple would take the last name of which ever of them proposed! This seemed so clear to me, so simple and reasonable that I held on to that premise for many years.
I remember when I was about seven, I happened to mention my thought to my mother that the couple took the last name of the person who proposed the marriage. My mother, an unfriendly woman, ever willing to rain on my parade, sneered at me and asked me, if I was correct, why was it that all of the women we knew took the name of the male member of the couple? I thought about that for a few minutes and quickly came up with the answer; because, I said, in our society it was normally the man who proposed, but that didn’t change the basic premise that the couple take the name of the person initiating the proposal.
Simple, logical and easy, a solution that should have charmed feminists before we began populating the world with hyphenated names that could have had the children of Mildred Parker-Gutowski and Jonathan Barnaby-Lieberwitz with the dreadful last name of Parker-Gutowski-Barnaby-Lieberwitz. God help the children of Mildred and Jonathan when they met up with and married a person with their own hyphens!
Fortunately, the hyphen seems to have gone out of fashion with the exception of a few interesting and recent cases. The marriage and name changes of actor, Aaron Johnson and agent, Samantha Taylor come to mind.
The “name change upon marriage” issue has been solved by women simply keeping their own name when they marry. This was a decision that I opted to do when I had one remaining child at home and married a man with two children of his own who would live with us. My son didn’t want to be the only one in our household with a different last name and was proud enough of his heritage to not want to give his last name up. Thus it was that I kept my former last name although not my maiden name.
I still think that the thought process I used in my childhood might have saved a lot of trouble to people in the ensuing years. It would have been acceptable to feminists everywhere, and also avoided the difficulties of the fortuitously short-lived “age of the hyphen”.
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