Women Are Still Being Judged for Not Taking Their Husbands' Last Names

Right now in the most of the developed world, it could be argued, women are considered about as "equal" to men as they have ever been. And yet, countering any "We've come a long way, baby"-type sentiment you might cheer about (intelligence in a woman is now considered by men to be more important than being pleasant and a good housekeeper; France is doing away with the term "mademoiselle"), there are deep, abiding problems that we're still working through. Some, like birth control access, are matters of health and freedom, while others are more "semantic," though no less problematic.

Reminds me of when I was in a pharmacy behind a lady, the day Sarah Palin was announced as McCain's running mate. A woman got a cell phone call and said “He picked who? Get on the phone to ( ) at Obama’s headquarters and let's find dirt on this bitch.” The woman who said it drove off in a car that had a sticker which read “Equality to men, why lower myself.” Liberals are funny. :-)

When we laid my mother to rest in the family plot in 1996, we found out that a child was buried there in the plot that was supposed to be for my mother. The child was about 2 years old when she died, about a year younger than my mother at the time. Her name was Margaret but there was no last name recorded for her in the cemetery’s records, her age but no date of birth. We have no idea who she was and we had never heard that name mentioned by anyone in the family including my mother. I have boxes full of old family papers and photographs but nothing that gives us any hint of who she was. We have no idea if the child was my mother’s sibling, a cousin or the child of a family friend or perhaps the illegitimate child of my mother’s uncle (?)

My brother went to the courthouse in Harrisburg PA where my mother’s family was from and lived to search for records but a fire in the 1940’s and several floods afterward destroyed many records and his search turned up nothing. We even searched on Ancestry.com and no census records from that time mention a child by that name.

It was so sad that this little girl so long forgotten was buried with no grave maker, no last name and apparently no record or memory of anyone living of who she was.

As this was the last plot, we had my mother buried and the child’s small casket reburied on top of her. When we had my mother’s name added to the family tombstone, we also had the name Margaret with the approximate year of her birth and date of her burial engraved too.

My wife was a radio personality when we married. She asked if I minded if she kept her “on air” name. I asked what the name on the check was going to be. As long as it was going into our bank account she could call herself whatever she wanted.

To most of the world she retained her name. To me, and our children...she has mine. I figured that was fair enough.

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