What’s in a name? A lot, it seems. It’s no good that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, when it comes to a name, a proper name, it needs to be ‘proper’. In recent years, many women I know, myself included, are choosing to take on their husband’s surname in marriage. From my own experience and from what I hear of other women’s, this can elicit surprisingly negative reactions, or if not negative, then at least surprised reactions; particularly if the decision is undertaken with any enthusiasm. It seems to be suggesting that you are wantonly oblivious to all that the suffragettes fought and starved themselves for; ignorant and dismissive of all the hard work of many women who ventured out from domestic drudgery to express themselves in the wider world. But then isn’t the point really that we are choosing to take on our husband’s surnames. The suffragettes fought not for distinctive surnames, but for choice.

To avoid all the political baggage of such a decision, I have often said that I took on my husband’s surname for aesthetic reasons – it fitted better rhythmically with my first name. In fact, at the time this was partly true, since I was particularly poetically minded at the time of my marriage. There were also social reasons, but of a different kind. To my surprise, I found that the older I got, the more immature people’s reactions became to my maiden name, which resembled a ‘naughty’ word. The quicker I could get rid of it, the better. There was also the nuisance of having to constantly spell it over the phone through the tittering.

Besides the aesthetic and the pragmatic, there are other reasons for changing. As one woman I know lamented, what’s wrong with wanting to create a family unit and take on the man’s name? Why not? It’s really not the worst of privations. Of course, he could change his, but then there’s all the confusion and the disruption of genealogies etc. etc. Marriage is a social institution and it needs all the cultural and linguistic routine and ritual it can attract to itself to make it socially real. Have women been conditioned to want to keep the family unit together? Is it innate? Is a woman’s readiness to change her surname an example of how she has accepted the ideology of her oppression, or simply an example of how wonderfully mutable and dynamic and open to change a woman can be. I could now eulogise woman’s innate mutability – the monthly cycles, the physical changes of pregnancy and the general inconstancy of the female body. But dare I risk admitting that, yes, women’s bodies are changeable, irregular and prone to lead to all kinds of emotional outbursts. Can I claim this? Is this to cite the terms of my own oppression? Can the female characteristics of woman be respected, or is to be female inherently to be ‘weak’? If these properties are indeed innate and not socially constructed, then can we not emphasise their strength? The dynamism, generative force, along with the destructive power.

Given this constant ever-shifting cycle, a new name is really the least of our worries. And there’s yet another reason why altering it really isn’t such a ‘bad’ thing: – one of the points I think is rarely made is that not to take on our husband’s surname is to retain our father’s and even if we are so bold as to use our mother’s maiden name, then really it belongs to her father and no matter where you turn, at some point, some dastardly man has owned the name.

So, given my situation stuck between this rock and that hard place, I gave my thanks to the suffragettes, cast my vote and abandoned my old phallic name ‘Willey’.