Why can’t it be something fun like swapping surnames and then creating a portmaneau or blended name for the kids.
“We should reject the patriarchy and refuse to adopt our husband’s surnames as our own!”"
“Right on!”
“We must take back what is ours and overthrow men’s dominance over women. We should fight to keep our maiden names.”
“Yeah!!
Wait a sec - we’re going to reject the cultural practice of taking on our husband’s surnames and we’re going to keep the ones that we were born with?”
“Exactly!”
“So we will keep the surnames that our fathers gave us in order to reject the patriarchy?”
“I… uhh… hang on, let me check my notes here.”
(I’m not shitting on anyone who chooses to do this btw; you do you. After all you aren’t property to be transferred from one owner to another. I’m just illustrating why bourgeois feminism is a dead end and why Marxist feminism is the only real path forward for women’s liberation.)
I mean you gotta start somewhere. My surname might also be my grandfather’s surname, but people don’t think about that, they think about how my surname is my mother’s surname instead of my father’s.
Yeah, I’m with you. I just think that ultimately it’s window-dressing, call me a class-reductionist if you will.
Women aren’t going to be liberated by keeping their father’s surname because there’s this context of an always-already existent gender subjugation that they find themselves born into, which is what my little vignette is basically pointing towards.
In lukewarm defence of myself, I feel the same sorta way about stuff like workers striking for minor pay increases or Bernie-tier politicians; I half-heartedly support that stuff—far be it from me to oppose it—and any gain no matter how small is worth something to the masses but, as a revolutionary, I don’t think it will ever go far enough in and of itself (hence why I’m also historicising this within the context of The Lucy Stone League of a century ago elsewhere in this thread).
To paraphrase James Connolly: our demands are most moderate, we only want the earth.
Oh yeah, it’s definitely not a remotely revolutionary action in itself, but like minor strikes and leftish politicians, it’s one of those things that plants a seed of radicalisation - it’s kind of a pain having people be weird about it, but having to tell people that my parents are married, have kept their own names, and gave me my mother’s surname has caused a few of them to actually question why taking the husband/father’s name is normal.
Proletarian revolution is still way off on the horizon here in the imperial core - if anything I fear we’re still more at risk of even-more-reactionary uprisings as the treats dry up - so every little thing that causes someone to start questioning their beliefs gives us an opportunity to illuminate and contextualise with the ultimate aim of awakening class consciousness. It’s a bit like introducing concepts through demonstrations in teaching - a Van der Graaf generator isn’t particularly important in physics, but getting people to ask how their hair stands up gives you room to start explaining electricity and polarities.
When my ex and I got married, we picked a new surname that we both liked but didn’t have any connection to. We’re not together anymore but I have no plans to return to my original name b/c I still like it and basically all of my friends and colleagues know me by the current name
This is incorrect, the feminist stance is that women decide if they or their wife get to keep the surname in a game of axe throwing. In case of a draw, both women end up with a hyphenated double name.
The couple should be presented with a bowl of beans and whoever can eat it the fastest gets to keep their name
Women keeping their last names as in such notoriously feminist paradises as all of Latin America
It’s still from the woman’s patriline though.
If we had one name transmitted patrilineally and one name transmitted matrilineally, that’d be really cool, and would also not cascade beyond 2 surnames.
No, children should get all their parents’ surnames ad infinitum. My grandkids will have 8 surnames. Their grandkids will have 32.
Say what you want, but this system has the fewest edge cases.
Jugemu Jugemu Gokou no Surikire Kaijari Suigyou no Suigyou Matsu Unrai Matsu Fuurai Matsu Kuuneru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro Yabura Kouji no Bura Kouji Paipo Paipo Paipo no Shuuringan Shuuringan no Guurindai Guurindai no Ponpokopii no Ponpokonaa no Choukyuumei no Chousuke but every part except “Chousuke” was actually the surname
Why’s it gotta start with you, rather than retroactively accounting for as far back in your ancestry as you can go?
And how do you do the ordering of all those names?
Abolish surnames, also abolish names, replace everything by 72 alphanumeric characters codes that are absolutely unique so we abolish all discrimination and administrative ambiguity /s
The advent of surnames in Europe heralded the downfall of feudalism so I have a soft spot in my heart for them based on that historical fact.
So in Europe up until this point, people stayed in their own villages and if there were two Johns in the same village then one would be Tall John and the other would be Pious John, or Strong John or Fair(haired) John. Basically you were your first name because there was absolutely no need for a surname.
The only use for surnames was for the aristocracy to lay claim to their incestuous lineage and their ancestral holdings and shit.
Anyway, suddenly the black death rolls around and wipes out 1/3 to 1/2 of the population in Europe. Crops are lying in the field to rot because there just isn’t enough labour available to do what needs to be done to survive until next season.
So the landlords smell trouble brewing and it becomes obvious that unless somebody harvests that grain then their village is fucked, and they sure as hell aren’t about to roll up their velvet sleeves, so they begin to lure nearby villagers to abandon their lord and the crops of their home village in favour of shifting next door and harvesting this lord’s crops with the promise of better pay and conditions.
Suddenly, where feudalism was once virtually set in stone, you have this black swan event and all this labour begins to get freed up to move around and labour starts to get a little bit of leverage as the foundations of feudalism begin to crack.
So next thing you have people from all sorts of villages moving around from place to place and everyone is named John and Henry and Margaret and Catherine and shit but also nobody knows anyone else because suddenly there’s this influx of people from everywhere else. So this ain’t cutting it anymore, and people begin to get named after their professions (John the blacksmith = John Blacksmith = John Smith, Henry the fuller = Henry Fuller, Margaret the baxter = Margaret Baxter etc.) or by things like patronymics (Johnson, Smithson, Ericson) or their personally-distinguishing characteristics or landmarks (in German this is really common with surnames like Bach, Bohm, Berger, Engel).
Anyway this is the moment where the tide started to shift and where feudalism was moribund - it would take other factors like the enclosure of the commons, the advent of chartered corporations for naval looting/trading/mass slaughter and enslavement expeditions, and the invention of the steam engine before we would see capitalism develop into its fully-fledged form but this freeing up of labour power and a rebalancing of economic and political power that shifted slightly in favour of serfs was enough that the house of cards that was feudalism would eventually come tumbling down.
And that’s why surnames heralded the downfall of feudalism - as soon as labour stopped being bound to one ancestral plot of land and lords started competing against one another for “employees” (if you’ll forgive me for using an anarchronism), where people needed a new way to distinguish between people who shared the same name, there the proto-capitalist/nascent capitalist market forces began to emerge within the cracks in the foundations of the old feudal material conditions.
