Married names

[mari]

How much of it is a factor of us seeing mostly Starfleet couples, though? (Or couples in which one person is in Starfleet.) Maybe being "military" they are also more "traditional"? If you want an in-universe explanation, anyway.

In RL, I'd have to agree that the writers probably just didn't think about it. In my own writing, I mix it up more, depending on whether the characters are human or not, how high their rank is, whether the spouse is civilian or not, personalities, etc. (mostly by personalities though). But I've grown up with more diverse "naming schemes" around me, where 80s and 90s TV writers may not have.

 

[DevilEyes]

BTW, the 10 percent figure is for the U.S. I don't know the figures for Europe, but I wouldn't be surprised to find the percentage of Mrs. Hisnames to be somewhat lower there. I've heard anecdotally that it is, but I haven't had time to research it.

I don't know the statistics, but I think here in Serbia, at least in urban areas, the practice of wife adding husband's surname to her own (with a hyphen in between) is at least as common as a wife taking her husband's surname. Do people do that often in USA?

The law allows (and has for decades) the following choices: both keeping their own surname, wife taking husband's surname instead of her own, wife adding her husband's surname to her own, husband taking his wife's surname, husband adding his wife's surname to his own; but options 2 and 3 are by far the most common. Since it's still a rather patriarchal culture, few women keep their own surname without adding husband's, and those that do are usually met with disapproval. There are even fewer men who take their wife's surname - and in the two cases I've heard of, the guy in question did it because he had an agenda (the first one was, as I've heard, some footballer a couple of decades ago who married the daughter of a better known former footballer; the second one is more recent - it's a certain paramilitary leader who is currently serving a long jail sentence for all sorts of crimes including a few high-profile assassinations... His wife's surname sounds more typically Serbian than his original family name which is more unusual - so it's blatantly obvious what was behind that decision. Can't have his fellow nationalists wondering behind his back "hmm... what kind of name is that?" )

 

[iguana_tonante]

I'm having trouble following your arguement... you state that 10 % of women don't take the traditional route so you can't understand why so many would do it in the future...

when you look at the number of women who get married, 10% is an extremely small amount. That means that most women DO take the traditional route. So if the majority of women take the traditional route, why wouldn't they do it in the future?

The majority of American women.

It isn't so in most of Europe, it isn't so in South America, it isn't so in China, and so on. I would guess than, considering all mankind, women changing their name are in a minority (even if probably a large minority, like 30-40%).

 

[DevilEyes]

I'm having trouble following your arguement... you state that 10 % of women don't take the traditional route so you can't understand why so many would do it in the future...

when you look at the number of women who get married, 10% is an extremely small amount. That means that most women DO take the traditional route. So if the majority of women take the traditional route, why wouldn't they do it in the future?

The majority of American women.

It isn't so in most of Europe, it isn't so in South America, it isn't so in China, and so on. I would guess than, considering all mankind, women changing their name are in a minority (even if probably a large minority, like 30-40%).

Sun from Lost is listed in every Lost website as "Sun-Hwa Kwon", even though Korean women don't take their husband's name, and her family name is Park. See http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:Sun-Hwa_Kwon

I wonder if her name was listed as Sun Kwon out of the lack of knowledge of other cultures, or, again, just to make things simpler for the English-speaking audience to understand?

 

[FormerLurker]

One thing no one has mentioned yet is that Sisko's second wife, Kasidy Yates, kept her name when they married.

 

[JustKate]

I'd forgotten that. Interesting, Lurker.

Which makes me wonder: Could it be that Trek mostly avoided the woman-keeping-her-own-name thing for so long because they considered it controversial - or feared it might be controversial? I don't think it really was then, but I could be mistaken - maybe we were less liberal than I remember, and Trek has definitely avoided some controversies. That's presumably why they avoided openly gay characters for so long. It wasn't that they necessarily thought gay=evil or that gayness wouldn't exist in the future. They just didn't, most of the time, want to deal with the flak from having openly gay characters.

Edit: Maybe they thought women keeping their own names would generate flak as well, though that seems a little peculiar, if so, since surely keeping one's birth name isn't any more controversial than, for example, women serving in combat positions, which Trek did all the time.

 

[SiorX]

Something that might be worth taking into consideration is that in cases like Crusher's, Jennifer Sisko's, and (later) Keiko O'Brien's, there are children in the mix too.

The reason the issue of changing their names is still such a headache for a lot of women today, I think, is because a desire to retain one's own identity conflicts with the pragmatism of having a family unit who share a name. If the children go by the patronymic, the mother becomes singled-out as the only X who doesn't use the name X. Double-barrelling gets ridiculous within a couple of generations.

There isn't an easy way of reconciling it, because there's so much bound up in the patriarchal way we in 'the west' use surnames - legally, culturally, and socially. To imagine a future where none of that's an issue anymore, I think you'd actually have to imagine a relatively radical overhaul of the whole way we consider naming and family units. I don't think that level of social speculation is one to which fin-de-siecle Trek was ever really drawn.

 

[iguana_tonante]

There isn't an easy way of reconciling it, because there's so much bound up in the patriarchal way we in 'the west' use surnames - legally, culturally, and socially. To imagine a future where none of that's an issue anymore, I think you'd actually have to imagine a relatively radical overhaul of the whole way we consider naming and family units. I don't think that level of social speculation is one to which fin-de-siecle Trek was ever really drawn.

Well, if I can offer a foreigner perspective, I don't think it's so monumental as you think. In Italy, women took their husband's name until the 70s. The they changed the rule. Sure, there were some gnashing of teeth at the time, but in a very short time people saw that it didn't really change anything substantial, so they acclimated very quickly. Husbands and children had no problems remembering who was their wife or mother even with a different same last name, and in a couple of years, nobody gave a damn. And Italy is still a very traditional and even patriarchal country.

On top of that, it's still ok to call someone Mrs. Husband Last Name if you don't know her last name, no offence intended or taken. No biggies, really.

 

[RegFan]

I think this happens rarely enough to be just a coincidence. The characters have never said something like "most women take their husband's name nowadays". And in some cases, we don't know which one took the other's name. Actually, a bigger problem is that only about one in three Trek characters is a woman.

 

[scotpens]

Actually, a bigger problem is that only about one in three Trek characters is a woman.

And why is that a problem?

Just because women are half the population, does that mean every TV show has to have 50 percent of its characters female? If fifteen percent of the human race is left-handed, do we need a corresponding percentage of left-handed characters in fiction?

In fact, Gene Rodddenberry was way ahead of his time by making one-third of the TOS Enterprise crew women.

 

[KimMH]

I was surprised lo so many years ago watching TNG when we really see the idea of families in space that few women seemed to keep their own names. I expected them to seem a little more progressive. I think keeping one's own name or adding the husbands name makes more sense. I have taken my husbands name - I never gave it a second thought 20 years ago. Heaven forbid - if I were to marry again for any reason though, I would hyphenate and keep my maiden and add my husbands name. For Whatever That's Worth.

 

[Daneel]

I tend to agree with the respondents who state that the writers probably just didn't really think about it. Also, if I might malign my own sex for a moment, most of the writers for the Trek shows were men, and I believe that many men are more likely to think of a woman taking her husband's surname as a given (especially, as has been mentioned, in American society).

 

[JustKate]

RegFan's post brings something to my mind. You know what's even rarer in Trek? Functional marriages and/or other long-term relationship of your choice - at least as far as we know. I mean, maybe a fairly high percentage of the TNG crew is married, but if so, we aren't told much about it (although there are many mentions of the Enterprise being home to families). Of course, the RL reason for this among the main characters is to leave everybody open for lots of plot-driven romances and so on, but as to whether we are supposed to assume that there is an in-universe reason or not, that's a lot harder to determine. Are we to assume that the main characters are typical or not? No idea.

So your point is well taken, RegFan - our sample of married couples is pretty darn small.

As for whether Scotpens' question (sorry - I had originally attributed this to Daneel, so my apologies if my post confused anybody) about whether "every TV show has to have 50 percent of its characters female," my answer to that would be "no." However, I don't see why they couldn't have the demographics of the extras be somewhat close to real life, at least on really basic things such as race and sex. I don't know if Trek did or not. I'll bet somebody knows, though....

 

[Therin of Andor]

Beverly Howard Crusher

And yet, "Sub Rosa" makes reference to the alien entity romancing "generations of Howard women", and her grandmother was a Howard - so Beverly seems to be the first in a long line of her mother's family to take on her husband's name.

 

[Myasishchev]

Luwaxanna changing her name to Troi (unless it was Deanna's dad who changed his name?)

...Will Riker changing his name to Troi?

I mean, Picard's "Mr Troi" in ST:NEM may have been a friendly jab aimed at the suddenly wussified man, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be factually true, too.

Timo Saloniemi

That would actually have been pretty cool. Too bad Titan didn't take that up.

At any rate, re: the OP, I've never understood it either. At all. The continued prevalence of patriarchal naming conventions really, really, really clashes with everything else about the 24th century.

The reason the issue of changing their names is still such a headache for a lot of women today, I think, is because a desire to retain one's own identity conflicts with the pragmatism of having a family unit who share a name. If the children go by the patronymic, the mother becomes singled-out as the only X who doesn't use the name X. Double-barrelling gets ridiculous within a couple of generations.

I've often wondered how the naming of children would work, if one wanted to be really gender-neutral. Compound names would either get completely unwieldy, very quickly, or tend to default back. Either coin flipping or mother-daughter and father-son inheritance are potential solutions.

Actually, a bigger problem is that only about one in three Trek characters is a woman.

Yeah, kinda lame, that. Especially insofar as women are intrinsically more interesting (and I can't tell if that's chauvinist or not ).

If fifteen percent of the human race is left-handed, do we need a corresponding percentage of left-handed characters in fiction?

Not in any individual fiction, or even any individual Star Trek series. But it's annoying when, in the aggregate, there are fifty percent more men, about one thousand percent more Europeans, and infinity percent more homosexuals than there are in the population.

Functional marriages and/or other long-term relationship of your choice - at least as far as we know. I mean, maybe a fairly high percentage of the TNG crew is married, but if so, we aren't told much about it (although there are many mentions of the Enterprise being home to families). Of course, the RL reason for this among the main characters is to leave everybody open for lots of plot-driven romances and so on, but as to whether we are supposed to assume that there is an in-universe reason or not, that's a lot harder to determine. Are we to assume that the main characters are typical or not? No idea.

I wouldn't be surprised if marriage in the modern day sense was atypical. Hell, marriage in the modern day sense is atypical in the modern day. Romantic relationships are, perhaps, not built to last. On the plus side, because of the omnipresence of the state, single parenthood seems to not be an economic problem of any kind. It kind of seems to bother kids who don't have two cohabiting parents--but it appears to be much more because their parents' died. I don't think we've ever seen a parenting situation where a breakup or divorce has been involved (except maybe Sybok, but he seemed pretty happy ). (I hasten to note "The Child" and "Unexpected" do not count in any way, shape or form.)

Edit: oh, wait, Nog. That was sort of a divorce situation, complete with abandonment. But it doesn't say anything about how the mating-and-parenting situation in the Federation, let alone with future humans, works.