To love, honour and rename
On my wedding day I was advised to hang onto my maiden name. As a writer and broadcaster this made sense professionally, but when I announced that I didn't want to change it at all, I found myself at the centre of a heated debate.
'When you marry you become a couple, and sharing a name is a public statement of togetherness,' cried shocked parents, aunts and their friends. Even more conventional members of my own peer group grew angry. 'What does it matter what name you go under? Whatever you do is still done by you.'
But, selfish as it sounds, a name is more than a title. I've worked with this one far too long to relinquish it now. It's a home that I have lived in all my life and feel attached to. 'There is a magical quality in names - to change the name is to change the character,' wrote Graham Green in Ways of Escape. I am too old to change.
In a traditional Church ceremony, a woman is given away by one man and passed to another like a slave. Her name, along with all her worldly goods, becomes her husband's. It is old-fashioned, not to say farcical, that women who work, who have their own incomes, bank balances and lives, should be stripped of their identity by a wedding vow. For women who marry later in life and have already established themselves under a name, changing it can seem faintly ridiculous, not to say professionally batty.
It never occurred to the labour peer Baroness Ann Mallalieu, QC, to change her name when she married. 'Maybe it was because I was a little older, thirty-three,' she says. 'I grew up with this name and it feels odd to change identity overnight. I find it insulting when I am introduced by my husband's name. If you suggested to a man that he change his name he would be staggered. Some women who have changed their names have been resentful - two of my friends changed their names back when their children left home.'
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