Have you ever been in a class and heard the phrase “the personal is the political,” and weren’t sure what it meant?
I think it means that every choice we make, no matter how insignificant, can be an opportunity for us to assert our political beliefs. I’m not talking about whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican but about how you feel about the way society is.
Take environmentalism, for example. Every time you seek out a recycling container or turn off your car while you’re idling at the curb waiting for a friend, you’re making a small choice that demonstrates your concern.
Right now, I have an opportunity to put my money where my mouth is with regard to feminism. I am a feminist. I believe men and women are equal and should be treated equally.
My wife is due to give birth to our first child in less than two months. People have asked us if we have come up with a name, but they usually don’t realize that we put as much thought into the last name of our daughter-to-be as the first.
Like the tradition of a woman taking a man’s name upon marriage, the assumption that a child should assume the father’s last name is rooted in ideas of head-of-household, ownership and authority that my wife and I do not agree with.
In a marriage between equals, should the children be given the father’s name just because that’s how everyone else does it? Is there a compelling reason to use the mother’s name?
When faced with this decision, some parents choose to saddle their child with a hyphenated last name, but I think this is a cumbersome solution. In other cases, parents create a new last name for themselves and their child.
A lot of parents opt to use one parent’s last name as the child’s middle name. This is a fine compromise, but the question remains which parent’s name is the middle and which is the last.
It seems to me that giving our daughter my wife’s last name will accomplish two things. First, every time we explain our decision to someone else, we’ll have an opportunity to talk about our beliefs. This can be tricky, as such explanations can come off as “more-feminist-than-thou” snobbery, but I hope we will be able to talk about this without seeming condescending.
The second thing we hope to accomplish concerns our daughter. When she gets old enough to ask why she has mommy’s last name instead of daddy’s, we can tell her simply that’s what we chose to do. We don’t have to talk about feminism or patriarchy or any philosophical ideas; we can just say that no matter what anyone else was doing, we decided to do what we wanted. The real lesson, it seems to me, is that regardless of what is normally or conventionally accepted, we always have choices. That’s what I hope to teach my daughter.
Jeremy Sullivan is a doctoral candidate studying American history. He can be reached at sullivandbk@gmail.com.
