Sometimes I feel like a space alien

Sometimes I kind of wonder how I, the uber-conformist, turned out so, well, unusual.  From childhood on, I have wanted nothing more than to fit in.  And yet somehow now I find myself sticking out in ways that I didn't used to.  (How many prepositions can I end sentences with?)

(1) I feel like I'm one of two people I know (in actual real life, as opposed to you lovely internet people) who did not take her husband's last name on getting married.  The other person? (yup) one of my law professors.  (One of my classmates, on finding out said prof kept her name, said in bafflement, "But why?")  Every other woman I know in the legal community here (school/firm/whatever) has taken her husband's name.  ALL my bright, smart, and feminist law school classmates have taken their husband's names.  (Actually, except one, possibly; I'm not sure if she has or hasn't, I've seen her use both.)

Mind you, that's not to say that I have a problem with these women taking their husbands' names.  I couldn't conceive of doing it myself, but that's me for my reasons, and everyone has to live their own lives, not those of other people.  But it is still sort of disorienting to realize HOW FEW women seem to make the same choice I did.

(I'd chalk it up to generational differences, but I don't know that this is the case; I'm sure I've said this before, but it seems to me that in college, none of my classmates were going to take their husband's names, but that by the time they all got married in the 10 years or so following, most actually did so.  Though I can think of at least two college friends who kept their own names, and one who hyphenated.)

(2) Sometimes I feel like the only person who not only doesn't have kids (most of my college classmates don't have kids), but has no intention of having kids.  This is probably exacerbated by the fact that almost every woman in my summer firm (as well as most of the men) has kids.  Which, overall, I actually think is great.  (Look, a law firm that expects you to have a life outside work!)  But this is seriously the first time, I think, that I've been surrounded by so. many. women. all raising kids at once, around me.  (Not literally.  I have not met most of said children.  But you get what I mean.)

I think this is actually an interesting distinction between getting a law degree and getting a Ph.D.  On the one hand, people say: Oh, academia is flexible!  How marvellous for raising children!  On the other hand: You're a woman in academia who has to decide to have children either while 1) going through coursework for grad school, 2) taking exams, doing research (in history, possibly overseas) and writing your dissertation, 3) on the job market, 4) on the tenure track, or 5) after you get tenure.  There are problems with ALL these possibilities.

Granted, there are problems with probably any choice of when to have kids.  During law school?  Lots of people do it and succeed, but it's not any easier (possibly harder) than doing it during a Ph.D. program.  In the first years of your law career?  Associates at law firms don't have time to spend with their kids!  (Obviously that's not always true, and there are lots of other kinds of legal jobs.  Still.)

But surrounded by the smart, successful women lawyers I work with this summer, it's a little flabbergasting to realize that if you go to law school straight out of undergrad, and you start to work at a law firm after graduation, you can probably make partner before someone who started grad school when you did gets tenure.  So if you want to wait till partner to have kids, you can do that.  All of the women partners at my firm have kids.  (I should add that my firm is probably not representative, and that all the women partners are fairly junior, age-wise.  But it's a young firm.)

Plus, until recently, you were MUCH more likely to get a stable job coming out of law school than coming out of a Ph.D. program,* which I think makes it easier to think about where you're going to be, for how long, when you can have kids, and whether you're going to have the MONEY to support having kids.  (Not that I think you have to have any particular amount of money to raise kids.  While ideally you're not homeless, I think people of all income levels can be great parents.  But living off grad stipends or adjuncting fees or moving from one one-year job to another does discourage some people from having kids until their financial situation is more stable, reasonably enough.)

I'm kind of rambling here, but I guess it's funny, because it seems to me that law is not necessarily a family-friendly career, BUT that in practice it's no less family-friendly than academia, and in fact, it might even be MORE family-friendly.  At least, there seems to be a much greater expectation that women will have kids.  People do, I'm sure, get "mommy-tracked" (God, I hate that expression), and in some ways, the expectation that women will have kids can be part of a more conservative culture that adheres to more traditional gender roles (see point 1 above!).  But even if the idea is that women will have kids is because that's what women are expected to do, it means that there's room for women to have kids.  Whereas I sometimes feel like there's not a lot of room for women (or men, frankly, unless they want to be traditionally absent from the day-to-day slog of child-rearing) to do that in academia - that academia's monastic roots show pretty strongly as a conflict between intellect and family.

(Again, I may be way off the mark here, because where I'm working is kind of atypical.  And I know tons of wonderful academic parents.  And I've never been a parent, in academia or out.  It just seems like the decision to parent is so much more fraught in academia than in law, even if in practice actually doing the parenting is difficult in both.)

Anyway.  The reason I'm rambling all over about this is that sometimes I wonder what things would have been like if I'd done this career path the other way round - if I'd gone to law school first, then into academia.  Would I have changed my name, if when I was in my early 20s I saw everyone doing so?  Would I have thought it would be cool to have kids, if I saw women working and raising kids, without the same kind of agonized analysis about when/how to have kids that I saw in grad school?  I mean, come on - one thing people in Ph.D. programs are good at is overanalysis.  (Well, lawyers, too, probably!)

I guess the shorthand version of what I'm saying is that the decision not to have kids feels much more peculiar for the legal setting than the academic setting.  It feels like just one of a variety of ways in which I'm peculiar for the legal setting.  And since I really did always dream of fitting in, I kind of wonder how I ended up in this position.

*Now it's just significantly more likely.

Comments

[Krazy Kitty]

The other day, people were discussing how a woman who's fiancé had a certain last name would have to worry about him wanting to give a silly matching first name to their kids (it was a geek joke and I quite frankly forgot it).

"Well, then they could also give the child her last name," said I.

"Some people do do that, you know?" a guy replied, apparently thinking that I was kidding.

"Especially if the woman is the last of her generation with her last name", he added helpfully (because simply wanting to keep your name for the sake of keeping your name is apparently not a valid reason).

"But why? Is this even legal?" barged in a 30 year old woman with a PhD in geophysics.

At which point I just mentally proceeded to the nearest wall to bang my head against it.

[Yusifu]

I was really struck by the fact that you and your law professor are the only two women you know who kept their surnames on marriage. Does that include people from your previous academic career? I'm a little taken aback by how many women now are changing their names. It seems like women from my college class who married 10-15 years ago tended to keep their names, but they're now changing them in greater numbers. But the only academics I know who changed their names did so before starting grad school or during the early '70s at the latest.

It's very striking about the childbearing thing. Does that mean everyone at your firm is straight identified? Does that seem any different from academia?

[Dame Eleanor Hull]

When I checked into my K'zoo hotel this year, I explained that my husband would be joining me later and that as we do not use the same last name, the clerk should make a note of his name. She asked, "How did you wind up with a different name from your husband?"

"Well, we got married and I didn't change my name."

"I didn't know you could do that!"

"You can, and many women do," I said. Clearly there are fewer of us all the time, though.

[Dr Mac]

I think you are assuming that most people have kids in their 20s. We are an academic family (she took my name) but we had kid #1 at age 33 and #2 at age 36. I finished my diss. 3 yrs before kid #1 and got a TT job when he was 1 yr old. Worked out just fine. It's not always easy and there's never enough money. *You seem really insecure about your decision NOT to have kids. Feel good about it!

[JC]

I just want to say that I am with you on this one. I am of the age where many of my peers are getting married and having kids (28) and have a PhD. I am always surprised when one of my friends with a PhD changes her name when she gets married—most of my friends with PhDs have not, and I am not changing my name when I get married in a few months, but a couple of friends who have gotten married recently have changed.

One thing I would have considered doing was combining my fiance’s name and my name to make a new last name. We are not doing that because we have long last names that would sound funny combined, and my fiancé is not into it, but I was also taken aback with how strange some people found that, when they were otherwise perfectly okay with a woman keeping her name. If you want to start a new family with your spouse where everyone shares a common name, what is a more equitable way of doing that than by taking a new name for everyone? Giving kids the mother’s last name also gets the same reaction from people who are otherwise okay with a woman keeping her name. A woman keeping her name (and then kids getting husband’s name) fits into many people’s worldviews now, but alternative ways of going about it still don’t.

[Bardiac]

My default expectation is that women won't change their names on marriage. But our culture seems to have gone backwards since the '70s, and now a lot of people (academics included) don't even consider not changing their names.

It's okay to be out of step with patriarchy.

[Notorious Ph.D.]

I wonder if there's an academic (or upper-class urban leftie) bubble about this name-changing thing. Only two women I know changed their names when they got married, so I assumed keeping one's own name was now the norm. On the other hand, the two women I *do* know who changed are my mother and my (much younger) sister-in-law.

Maybe it's just our generation? Maybe your classmates are ((shudder)) post-feminists?

[Susan]

I've noticed more and more women around me changing their names. It bothers me, primarily because from what I can tell, it's reflexive rather than thoughtful.

Hell, yesterday my sister castigated me as a feminist (smirk) for suggesting that her wedding invitation read Mr and Mrs dad's-firstname and mom's-firstname lastname rather than Mr and Mrs dad's firstname lastname (the titles and other formatting being "non-negotiable). When I pressed her as to whether she wants to be (seen as) an appendage to her future husband, she musted=red an "I'll think about it."

So while the majority of my close friends haven't changed their names (or have made up new ones), the majority of my less close friends, peers, and family don't think twice about taking their husband's last names. One college friend said, "he cares, I don't, what's the big deal." To me, *that statement* is a big deal for about 80 billion reasons, but most women, even the ones I went to college with and thought were more progressive, don't even think about names as mattering. That's a mindset that I can't fathom even as I know so many people who have it.

[Jackie]

I think I must be in the same urban/leftie/upper-class bubble as another commenter, because I know a lot of women who didn't change their name when they got married. Also, be careful about assumptions-- my husband and I have the same last name because we made up a new name and both took it after our wedding, so if you didn't know us, you might think we were more traditional than we are.

[Kristen]

I agree with what Susan said above, that what bothers me most about women taking the husband's surname on marriage is that it is reflexive in many cases rather than a considered choice.

In my family, in my generation, I have 3 female cousins on one side and 1 on the other, plus my sister. My sister and I kept our names; all four cousins changed theirs. One is now divorc(ed/ing - not sure if it's final) but I think she is going to keep her married name, and I think the reasoning is to have the same name as her two children.

Some of the feeling of not fitting in might just be general insecurity? I get that feeling too, the "omg I am faking it and people will catch on and realize I am not the person they think I am." If that is what you have...

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Thanks for the comments, everyone!

@KrazyKitty and @Dame Eleanor - argghh! Again, it's not that I have an objection to women changing their names (well, I probably do, on one level, but again, it's not my place to worry about what other people do). Rather, it's the *bafflement* of other people at the concept that gets me. I would totally be fine with, "oh, yeah, I just preferred to change my name myself," but the whole "what??? women can keep their names?!?!?!?!" TOTALLY makes me crazy. My choice feels more like a choice when it's not couched as completely unfamiliar and foreign and potentially illegal.

Yusifu - no, that's not including people from my academic career (I just don't hang around much with academics in person these days!). Many (most?) academic women I know kept their names, and those who didn't have never reacted as though keeping my name is weird potentially illegal (they've probably had a harder time defending changing their names, actually). That's why these other reactions feel so weird!

@Dr. Mac - I don't think I'm actually assuming that most people have kids in their 20s, as much as the people around me in the legal profession have tended to assume that. (I never have assumed people have kids in their 20s; no one in my family does!) I'm also in an academic field where (at least when I did was doing this) even someone who went straight through from undergrad would be lucky to get a tenure-track before hitting 30, so that's the timeline in my head. Law grads who went straight out of undergrad could make partner in their early 30s; if you *start* the T-T job at/after 30, you're still facing a full tenure track of establishing yourself, which will go later than establishing yourself in a law firm. (Assuming no deviations from the traditional path for either.)

Also, not remotely intending to diminish your role as a father, but I think the experience of having children is different for academic women than academic men. Not necessarily harder, but different. Especially if both partners are academics (not sure if that's what "academic family" means so not sure if that describes you or not).

@JC, yes, I agree, people see a woman keeping her name (but the kids getting his) as VERY different from the MAN changing his name (omg no!! how could you MAKE him DO THAT??) or the kids not getting the husband's name. The latter two are even MORE mind-blowing!

@Notorious - I think it's more prevalent in leftie urban bubbles (or at least, in such bubbles I'm unlikely to get the "is that even legal??!?" reaction), but I don't think it's entirely class-based or generational; all my college friends count as urban lefties (and yuppies), but a LOT of have now changed their names. And the ones who didn't seem to be the ones who married longer ago, rather than more recently. So I kind of agree with Bardiac that we're going backwards!

(And Bardiac, thanks! It's just funny to recognize how much harder it is to be out of step with patriarchy where that patriarchy takes different forms. Academia's still patriarchal, I'd argue, but this particular issue wasn't a big deal there.)

@Susan - I've seen the "he cares, I don't" reaction before, and like you, I am SUPREMELY bothered by it. I, personally, do care about my name! a lot! And anything that's supposed to matter to men but not to women makes me uncomfortable (when it's something we both share, of course). Why shouldn't women care, when we're the ones who have to go through the hassle of paperwork to change our names, and who can get lost in paper trails because people no longer know how to find us? I don't think that changing one's name is a major oppression, and I know for many there are upsides to it, but where there are downsides, only the women suffer them. And then there are all the implicated identity shifts that go along with changing. (If my identity is tied to my name, how would changing my name not change my identity?) Granted, for a lot of people that would be the point - you are a different person as a married person, changing your name reflects that (although, why then don't MEN signal their changed social identity of being married? Why is that identity only important for women? THAT's what bugs me most, I think. I refuse to have my identity defined by my marital status - admittedly, it's an important part of my identity, but I don't want it to be the defining one. But then, I'm the person who got married in a judge's office because for me it was an intensely private moment, only about NLLDH and me, and why would I WANT to do that in front of a whole crowd of people?? So again, I'm weird.)

@Jackie - You're right, I should keep in mind the possibility that both parties changed their names. It's clear that my classmates on Facebook didn't, though, because they're all listed under FirstName MaidenName MarriedName. But of course some people do!

[New Kid on the Hallway]

@Kristen (we cross-posted!) - yes, I agree some of it is general insecurity and these are the factors I chose to focus on. And even if I'd changed my name and had kids, I'd feel like I stick out since I'm 15 years older than most of my classmates!

That said, I don't know if insecurity is quite what I meant to express by talking about feeling like I don't fit in. It is weird to feel like I don't fit in, but I'm not remotely insecure about my choices; I have NO regrets about keeping my name or not having kids, and am not changing those things; it's more a feeling of, Why isn't anyone else sensible enough to approach things the way that I do?? :-P It's more observing the fact that I don't fit in, than bemoaning it.

And, it's just musing about where these choices come from - where do the real roots lie? Did I go into academia first in part because it seemed like a culture that would support these inclinations in me, or did these inclinations develop in part because of my time in academia, and if I'd followed a different path, would these inclinations have been changed? (This is partly me the historian wondering what role culture plays and how forceful it is - I like to think, for instance, that I would think slavery was wrong no matter when or where I lived. But that's in part because that's what my culture has told me to think. If I grew up a slave-owner in the antebellum south, I've always thought I'd have found ways to reconcile myself to slavery (am not proud of this, just that's what I think - the system of slavery was evil, but most slave-owners weren't evil as individuals - wrong, sure, but not evil). So I wonder which particular social forces helped develop my currently out-of-sync beliefs re: names. Or, how much is us as individuals and how much is as as the result of the influence of our culture?

Okay, will stop rambling!

[Janice]

We all tend to look around and see the ways that we don't fit into the norm. Me? I'm never able to join in on the discussion of local restaurants and new release movies (due to work schedules and special-needs youngest).

But, yeah, sometimes I feel distinctly out of step for not choosing to go by "Mrs. Hissurname". Not out of step in any way I'd want to change, mind you!

[T.E.]

I wonder how much the preponderance of childlessness among women academics has to do with their much greater likelihood of being in long-distance relationships - about which you know all too much, of course. (A multi-year study of on the retention of women faculty at the R1 I just left documented that disparity in detail.) Assuming for the sake of argument that the pressures of grad/law school and early-career work are comparable in the two fields, the woman with a stably-employed live-in partner is in a much better position to make choices about when to start a family.

This is just anecdotal, of course, but I will share anyway: At my first job, my department and the college in general had a strikingly large number of women faculty with small children. That had something to do with having a family-friendly workplace culture, but I think a lot of it was also the fact that the college had traditionally hired locally/regionally/among its own alumni, so somewhat older women faculty there were *much* more likely to have local extended family to call on for support. Also, the college was the sort of place that often hired people whose spouses had more research-oriented jobs at the local R1 or teaching hospitals, so, again, spouse on the scene and stably and relatively lucratively employed.

Also anecdotal: now that I have moved from a college town to a lawyer town, I find myself among lots and lots of two-lawyer couples with a concomitant profusion of sproggage. I do feel a little out of it in this context, since I've moved for so long in circles where childlessness is the norm. Yes, very often the woman in the couple has been mommy-tracked, but she will have made her career decisions in the context of a marriage in which one partner can support the family if need be.

[richard]

In my little slice of academia, I actually can't think of a single woman I know who took her husband's family name. In fact, the only name-changing example I know of around here is a man who took his wife's family name. But any children do tend to have the father's family name, or a hyphenated family name (usually father-mother). I kind of assumed the pattern was a response to the social uncertainty of paternity.

[Terminal Degree]

I often feel like a fish out of water here in my rural, Southern, college town. Keeping my own name was rather scandalous!

Now that I'm having a baby, I'm sort of sad that the kid and I won't have a last name in common (although he's getting my last name as his middle name). It's sort of ironic that I'm the parent who is going through the hard work of nine rough months of pregnancy, followed by three months of full-time maternity leave (which will slow down my career and suck $ out of my retirement), and I'll spend probably a year of being the food source...and yet the kid will have my husband's last name, NOT mine.

But we made this choice to give the kid Dad's last name for a number of reasons. For starters, in this culture, if the kid doesn't have my husband's last name, everyone will incorrectly assume that my husband is not really the father of the child, and here in the Bible Belt, that's not something we want to burden our kid with.

I think Janice is on the right track--we ALL feel like aliens sometimes. :) But perhaps we need to feel like pioneers instead--we're not afraid to do things a little differently. Maybe that's something to celebrate. :)

[Seeking Solace]

I started law school at 25. I had just finished my master's degree. Also, I got married at 24.

My 20's was pretty much a blur of undergrad, grad and law school. Then, it was trying to pass the Bar. Needless to say, I did not start my legal career until I was 30 (Major illness and taking the NY bar four times will do that.) Anyway, I was so consumed with establishing a career and managing a chonic illness, that children were not even on the radar.

One of things that I did find among my female peers was that although some wanted to go on the partnership track, which sometimes led to the "mommy-track" (I hate that term too, but for lack of something better...) Some decided that it would be better and more flexible to hang their own shingle after doing some time at a firm. You are the boss, you make your own hours...

I did the later which did give me the flexibility I wanted. And, you would be amazed at the amount of support that a solo practitioner or partnership can receive.

But, I agree that we all feel like aliens. When I decided to leave practice to become an academic, my law peers gave me so much grief. "Why would you want to leave the profession to go and teach law to undergrads?" Well, I don't regret my decision. It is what is best for me.

You too will find your place. Sometimes, we have to carve our own path.

[What Now?]

The only married women at my current school that have kept their own last names are the lesbians! There's a 100% correspondence between keeping or changing one's name and the gender of one's partner (and there are actually enough lesbians at the school to give us a valid sample size -- one of the many reasons I love FGS!). At first, I thought that this conformity of straight women's changing their names upon marrying was about my move from college to high school, but in fact most of the women I taught with at St. Martyr's have or are changing their name upon getting married, so maybe it's a larger phenomenon. I find it interesting that the lesbians I know are exempt from the name-changing pressure, which makes it clear that it's not really about marriage per se but, as Bardiac notes, about patriarchal ownership. And/or that lesbians are already outside of the norm and thus not pressured to conform in the same ways.

[joy]

I think your observations about name-changing, kids, and the legal community might be somewhat place-specific. In New York, I know attorneys both in private corporate practice and in nonprofit work (specifically, women's-issue nonprofit work) who have kept their names, changed their names, had kids, or chosen not to have kids. The diversity of marriage and reproductive choices I've encountered among my colleagues-to-be is actually quite refreshing. I don't think I'll be outside the norm as a name-keeping, childless married woman.

That said, with a couple of super-feminist exceptions, my classmates were almost all surprised/appalled/pitying that I chose not to have an engagement ring.

[Fifi Bluestocking]

I am totally with you on number 1! And of those women I know who didn't change their names on marrying, many seem to have given their kids the husband's last name and none can give me a reason I understand for it (just the "it's important for my husband to have the same name as his kids but I don't care" argument).

At a recent wedding I attended (civil ceremony) when I knew that the woman was definitely planning to keep her name, the registrar turned to the guests at the end of the ceremony and said that his final duty was "to introduce the new Mr and Mrs [groom's last name]". So apparently he just assumed that it would be OK to make this remark without checking with the couple what they were doing about names. This made me LIVID. OK, rant over...

[Chel]

I got married when I was twenty-one, and I didn't think much about changing my name. I suppose I was one of those people who did it without reflection. I had thought at some time in my younger life that I would hyphenate, but I did not, mainly because I didn't like the combination. If I thought about the name change at all, it was the way I thought about the sometimes transient state of life and I probably wanted to have his last name because I wanted to be a part of his world.

Now, twenty-one years later, I can't imagine having kept that name. I don't have contact with my family. The name I had was the name given to me by a father who adopted me (not biological), and it doesn't seem to represent any part of myself today. My last name, my husband's last name, is who I am because this family, the one I produced and now have, is me.

I guess that's a different perspective - the idea of *not* wanting to retain that part of your life.

[wini]

@Fifi Bluestocking I really don't like my last name, but I didn't change it. (My mom' nephew's wide did change her last name precisely because she hated dealing with her maiden name. She went from four syllables and 12 consonants to a one syllable English last name.) My son has my husband's last name partly for that reason. I won't hyphenate my son's name because it's bad enough having an apostrophe in your name these days, much less a hyphen too. (My passport, social security card and license plate all spell my last name differently.) Even my school spells my name wrong in their directory. ARGH.

That said, if we have another child he or she is getting my last name and they better like it!

[The Cranky Professor]

I'm too lazy to go dig out my copy of Felix Krull: memoirs of a confidence man (Mann's post-Nobel comic novel), but Felix complains at one (early) point that his sister has the advantage of knowing she can soon change her name when she marries, while he's stuck with his for life.

Well, until he embarks on his career.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

@Janice - no, I don't want to change, either!

@T.E. - I totally agree about the role staying in one place plays. I think it has a big impact. At Rural Utopia, most of the scientists were super happy to stay in the teeny town forever, and had spouses/kids. Many more of the humanists were looking for ways get out of the teeny town, and didn't. It was an interesting contrast.

@richard - historically, I'm sure the paternity thing was the reason behind all this, but I'd hate to think that today people are still concerned that if a child doesn't have the father's name, it might not be his! (Though obviously as TerminalDegree points out, it hasn't disappeared...)

@What Now? - thanks for the data! I (sadly) haven't lived anywhere gays and lesbians can legally marry, so name-changing in that context hasn't come up. (And does anyone expect gay men who marry to change their names?) You're right, that totally highlights the patriarchalness of the tradition!

@joy - I think my observations are place-specific, but honestly, I think NYC is the exception rather than the rule. (I also have to confess that I adore my engagement ring! But I would never pressure anyone to get one who didn't want one - I do hate most of the hoopla around what's the "correct" kind of ring. I just wish NLLDH could have got one, because he really really missed having an equivalent for men.)

@Chel - that makes total sense, and is why I would never say that a woman should or shouldn't change her name. I'm lucky enough to have a really good relationship with the family that gave me my name, but if not, it would be a very different situation.

@wini - I get hating your name, and if you really don't like it, changing it makes sense. (I'm a bit odd - I can't even imagine changing a blogname, let alone any other kind, even though I don't like my first name particularly.) I laugh because my last name confuses people - it's not the most complicated thing out there, but it has some unusual consonants, so while it's pronounced exactly as it's spelled, people always hesitate, and they never get it orally. I've just developed the attitude that people had damn well BETTER learn my name!

@Cranky - that's true, if a guy *wants* to change his name, he has a harder time of it than women do!