(Originally published in Oregon Humanities magazine)
For my husband and I, deciding to marry was easy. It was deciding how we would marry that got complicated. Who should officiate? A Rabbi or a Unitarian Minister? We chose a Justice of the Peace. Would there be a diamond? A white dress? A tuxedo? None of the above. Most perplexing, however, was deciding what would become of my last name.
We felt new to the world in our connectedness and wanted our name to represent that unity. We went through the possibilities. Pittle-Kaye. The hyphenation option turned us off. If we had kids who married other hyphenates, who would their kids be? Pittle-Kaye-Smith-Taylor? We thought about combining our names. Kaytle or Paye. Both options discontinued us from our lineage. I was particularly sensitive to this because my mother is a genealogist and sometimes lost people in history due to name changes. In particular, she lost women when they got married as if they had been erased from existence. If the marriage was undocumented and the man’s name was unknown to her, then her research stopped dead in its tracks, an entire family line blunted.
One woman I know made her maiden name her first name and then shared her husband’s last name. I liked that solution, but with a name like Pittle, it wasn’t quite an option. It came down to a choice. Would it be Pittle? Or Kaye?
Truth be told, I was secretly shrinking from the holy sisters of feminism, the vaporous council of whispers — to which I have always been sympathetic — that were telling me that by changing my name, the symbol of my being, I was willingly devaluing myself and my heritage. In turn, I would be creating a union of un-equals. This frightened me the same way that drug ads on television frighten me; the ones that expound on the many possible side effects that a drug probably won’t, but possibly could have: diarrhea, vomiting, internal bleeding, blindness, paralysis, death. Creating a union of un-equals, I feared, could be a fate worse than death.
I did some digging and found information that supported my fears. The Lucy Stone League, originally founded in 1921, is an organization dedicated to “equal rights for women and men to retain, modify and create their names, believing that a person’s name is fundamental to her/
his existence.” They seek equality in the “frequency of name retention, modification and creation between men and women at marriage and throughout life.” In their view, a woman changing her name when married is akin to giving inmates numbers and stripping them of their name in prison. They feel this practice serves to take away a sense of importance and humanity from the inmates, and advocate that name changing is “equally damning” for women entering a marriage. That approximately 90% of women abandon their names in favor of their husband’s indicates to them that, as a country, we believe that women are not important. Their identities are not worth as much as men’s.
In The Language of Names, husband and wife co-authors Justin Kaplan and Anne Bernays warn, “Whenever a woman marries, sheds her name and substitutes her husband’s, she’s also shedding a part of herself, part of who she’s been since birth. Whether she’s conscious of it or not, if she changes her name, her marriage will be lopsided, like a scale with five pounds of nuts on one side and two on the other.”
Describing women who keep their own name, they write that these women “tend to be achievers and individualists who have already established their names professionally … and see no reason to surrender them. The higher their education level, the less likely they are to follow conventional practice.”
If I chose to take my husband’s name, was I no longer an achiever, an individualist? Would my gesture symbolically contribute to the belief that women are not important? Me, who asked my husband to marry me; would I be a two-pound sack of nuts?
I could blame it on the evil official at Ellis Island who knowingly stamped my grandfather’s papers “Pittle” when he arrived in this country (changing his name from Pytel). Had my name been something less suggestive (childhood taunts like she-pittled-in-the middle-of-the-griddle-and-it-fried haunt me still), even Pytel, the decision might have been completely different. We would have been able to consider it as the symbol of our new life. But with facts as they were, Kaye was just a better name. And, I reasoned, if a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, then a name is sometimes just a name. My life would amount to more than a two-pound sack of nuts.
Once the difficult decision was made, I thought the rest would be easy. I was excited by the change. The first document was the marriage certificate. If a woman is listed with her new name, she legally revokes the use of her maiden name. If, however, she lists her maiden name, she has the right to use either name. I made sure to name myself Pittle on my marriage certificate, so that future genealogists would not lose me.
However, with each new document, I became increasingly sad, as if I were leaving home for good. I wondered what my grandfather felt like standing on the boat watching Poland disappear from view; what it felt like arriving in New York, waiting in line only to have someone write his name wrong on some document. Did he know? Did he like the change? Did it somehow make him feel a part of his new home?
Standing in line at the Social Security office waiting to make the final name change, I thought about all my ancestors and realized that there was one thing that I shared with all of them, and that was change. My mother’s paternal line changed from Koëll to Kell upon immigration. Her maternal line, through a series of marriages, changed from South, to Kell, to Hayden, to Reel. My father’s mother went from Connelly to Pittle. So after the clerk stamped my papers making it official, I turned around proudly fingering the letters of my new name, my new life. The voice of the clerk called after me, “Have a nice day, Mrs. Kaye.”
