Name that feminist

Some of my best writing is in other people's comment sections. The good writers are so stimulating and it becomes like writing a letter. One of my friends and I discovered the same thing about our journals and our letters in college. Out letters to each other were so much more interesting than our journal entries that we would write in journals to each other and then photo-copy them and send them as letters.! Wow, I had forgotten all about that. How neat to have a friend so close that we could send our journal entries to each other.

Anyhoo, here, in a nod to my heritage, is a comment I left at Feminist Mormon Housewives, it was a post about taking, or not, your husband's last name:

Ok, I'm chiming in to this looonng discussion. I decided to keep my last name a long time ago, (purely for reasons of principle, because I have a fairly inelegant last name. Now, I kind of like it because it's funny.) However, one of my boyfriends said he thought it was more romantic for a couple to share a name and I thought about it and thought that one possibility, among hundreds, is to find a common ancestor or ancestoral place and take that as a last name. I have lots of cool last names in my heritage, for example: Braidwood. :)

I am not just changing my last name to my husband's though. I think women are used to saying, "It's not a big deal, I don't mind." But I think a good test of how fair something is, is would it go both ways? If the last name isn't a big deal, would your husband change his name to yours? Well, then it's a pretty big deal, isn't it. (She said gently)

Categories: My Life, Essay