Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions(5)
Tell Chizalum that women actually don’t need to be championed and revered; they just need to be treated as equal human beings. There is a patronizing undertone to the idea of women needing to be “championed” and “revered” because they are women. It makes me think of chivalry, and the premise of chivalry is female weakness.
SEVENTH SUGGESTION
Never speak of marriage as an achievement. Find ways to make clear to her that marriage is not an achievement, nor is it what she should aspire to. A marriage can be happy or unhappy, but it is not an achievement.
We condition girls to aspire to marriage and we do not condition boys to aspire to marriage, and so there is already a terrible imbalance at the start. The girls will grow up to be women preoccupied with marriage. The boys will grow up to be men who are not preoccupied with marriage. The women marry those men. The relationship is automatically uneven because the institution matters more to one than the other. Is it any wonder that, in so many marriages, women sacrifice more, at a loss to themselves, because they have to constantly maintain an uneven exchange? One consequence of this imbalance is the very shabby and very familiar phenomenon of two women publicly fighting over a man, while the man remains silent.
When Hillary Clinton was running for president of the United States, the first descriptor on her Twitter account was “Wife.” The first descriptor on the Twitter account of Bill Clinton, her husband, is “Founder,” not “Husband.” (Because of this, I have an unreasonable affection for the very few men who use “husband” as their first descriptor.) In a strange way, it doesn’t feel unusual that she would define herself as a wife like this, while he doesn’t define himself as a husband. It feels normal, because it is so common; our world still largely values a woman’s marital and maternal roles more than anything else.
After she married Bill Clinton in 1975, Hillary Clinton kept her name, Hillary Rodham. Eventually she began to add his name, Clinton, to hers, and then after a while she dropped “Rodham” because of political pressure—because her husband would lose voters who were offended that his wife had kept her name.
Reading of this made me think not only of how American voters apparently place retrograde marital expectations on women, but also of my own experience with my name.
You remember how a journalist unilaterally decided to give me a new name—Mrs. Husband’s Surname—on learning that I was married, and how I asked him to stop because that was not my name. I will never forget the smoldering hostility from some Nigerian women in response to this. It is interesting that there was more hostility, in general, from women than from men, many of whom insisted on calling me what was not my name, as though to silence my voice.
I wondered about that, and thought that perhaps for many of them, my choice represented a challenge to their idea of what is the norm.
Even some friends made statements like “You are successful and so it is okay to keep your name.” Which made me wonder: Why does a woman have to be successful at work in order to justify keeping her name?
The truth is that I have not kept my name because I am successful. Had I not had the good fortune to be published and widely read, I would still have kept my name. I have kept my name because it is my name. I have kept my name because I like my name.
There are people who say “Well, your name is also about patriarchy because it is your father’s name.” Indeed. But the point is simply this: Whether it came from my father or from the moon, it is the name that I have had since I was born, the name with which I traveled my life’s milestones, the name I have answered to since that first day I went to kindergarten on a hazy morning and my teacher said, “Answer ‘present’ if you hear your name. Number one: Adichie!”
More important, every woman should have the choice of keeping her name—but the reality is that there is an overwhelming societal pressure to conform. There are obviously women who want to take their husband’s names, but there are women who do not want to conform but for whom the required energy—mental, emotional, even physical—is just too much. How many men do you think would be willing to change their names on getting married?
“Mrs.” is a title I dislike because Nigerian society gives it too much value. I have observed too many cases of men and women who proudly speak of the title of Mrs. as though those who are not Mrs. have somehow failed at something. Mrs. can be a choice, but to infuse it with as much value as our culture does is disturbing. The value we give to Mrs. means that marriage changes the social status of a woman but not that of a man. (Is that perhaps why many women complain of married men still “acting” as though they were single? Perhaps if our society asked married men to change their names and take on a new title, different from Mr., their behavior might change as well? Ha!) But more seriously, if you, a twenty-eight-year-old master’s degree holder, go overnight from Ijeawele Eze to Mrs. Ijeawele Udegbunam, surely it requires not just the mental energy of changing passports and licenses but also a psychic change, a new “becoming”? This new “becoming” would not matter so much if men, too, had to undergo it.
I prefer Ms. because it is similar to Mr. A man is Mr. whether married or not, a woman is Ms. whether married or not. So please teach Chizalum that in a truly just society, women should not be expected to make marriage-based changes that men are not expected to make. Here’s a nifty solution: Each couple that marries should take on an entirely new surname, chosen however they want as long as both agree to it, so that a day after the wedding, both husband and wife can hold hands and joyfully journey off to the municipal offices to change their passports, driver’s licenses, signatures, initials, bank accounts, etc.