If you take your husband’s name, you must be dependent and incompetent. If you don’t, of course, you’re a ball-busting feminist – or that even more pitiable creature, someone without a husband at all. And, in most cases, you still have a name that came down to you patrilineally anyway. Luckily, there is one woman who’s thrown off the chains of the nomenclature patriarchy and received only praise for it. I speak, of course, of Lady Gaga.
These two make one high-profile Prop 8 couple, dontcha know? (They were married August 2008, months before the November election, in Beverly Hills). But I’m wondering if this is some statement on the consolidation of the post-feminist world. Things do change:
Taking your husband’s surname, traditionally, makes you an auxiliary, an adjunct, the cute female sidekick, a spinoff, a derivative, Mrs. Him. But for some women now, it’s an assumption, rather than a loss, of power — shared power. “Instead of feeling like I ‘belong’ to my husband now that I have his last name, I feel like we are on equal footing, says Amy Owings, 34, a executive assistant in Overland Park, Kan. “We are both Owings, so now I claim him as much as he claims me.”