Confessions of a Stepford wife (was Names)

[Rita Winston]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., Amanda Lewanski <editor at t...> wrote:

> By the way, I did what my mother did, what I thought everyone did,
> and took my maiden name as my middle name--from Amanda Lee Peters
> to Amanda Peters Lewanski. But Jan, un-Texan, had never heard of 
> this convention. Is it a regionalism? Honest, everyone I know of 
> that took their husband's name did this. I'm curious.

I was born and raised in Southern California and both my parents were 
born and raised and married in New York, and my mother took my 
father's surname and moved her maiden name to middle name, and I grew 
up believing that that was what everyone did. The first time I ever 
had any doubt at all whether it was what everyone did was in ninth 
grade. Mrs. Charvonia (she was Greek, with an accent, and her first 
name was Athena) was a teacher for young children, but was pressed 
into service as a substitute teacher for us one day. She taught us 
the Greek alphabet (except I didn't learn it), and had us read aloud 
from and disucss ANTIGONE (in English translation). She also made a 
short but impassioned little speech advising all the girls to use 
their maiden name for middle name once married, in order to maintain 
our connection to our parents and relatives. I wondered why she was 
so impassioned about telling us to do what we would automatically do. 
I figured that things must be done differently in Greece.

My friend Lee took her husband's surname, Gold, to replace her 
father's surname, Klingstein. She doesn't say anything about Gold 
being shorter and easier to spell. She says she likes her husband a 
lot better than she liked her father, and that her maiden name was 
never HER name, but only her father's name -- in her youth, he used 
to scold her constantly (e.g. for any real or imagined lapse in table 
manners) that anyone who saw her do that would be so disgusted that 
they would refuse to associate with him or her mother, which would 
ruin his business and force them into the poorhouse. A difference 
between me and Lee is that my surname is MY name, it is  merely a 
CO-INCIDENCE that my father has the same surname. Okay, a skosh more 
than a co-incidence, as I do appreciate the connection to his 
mother, my favorite grandmother.