Surnames & Patriarchy

The other day on the internet there was a conversation about changing surnames after marriage.

To summarize the conversation:

Some people argued that feminists should not get married because marriage limits the agency of women in Nigeria.
Marriage affects women in many ways, but changing surnames re-inforces the idea that women belong to men.
Women who choose to keep their surnames after marriage face varying degrees of difficulty. Some experience issues while others don’t.
One of the difficulties of this decision is choosing what to name the kids. Some people use a compound name, other people use the husband’s name, but fewer women use their own surname.
Traditionally and in religion, there’s no actual requirement for the woman to take up her husband’s name.
Women who change their name do this either because they want to or because they think it’s easier. These women do not want to be discounted as feminist for their choice.

Here’s what I think:

Marriage does limit the agency of women in Nigeria. I say this from the experience of my own family. If my mum wasn’t married to my dad, she would feel more free to pursue a partnership with someone that genuinely cares about her and wants the same things out of life. In many ways, marriage prevented her from pursuing this goal.
On the flip side, marriage was a tool she used to navigate life as the head of our family. Marriage was a passkey to several social and professional groups e.g. church and work. Without the illusion of being married, I believe she’d have been significantly limited in those spaces.
Society respects marriage as a marker of commitment, which in turn should be a marker of responsibility. The idea is that if you have family you have more to lose, and so you’re more likely to be trusted. However, in Nigeria’s patriarchal system, this is not true. Marriage is not a marker of commitment or responsibility for most men.
Marriage doesn’t have equity in a patriarchal system because it’s a system of violence. If you take physical strength as the measure of leadership potential in a community, then whoever can perpetrate the most violence will always lead. You can draw a line from the unchecked power of men in the family unit all the way up to the state.
I don’t think women choosing to get married limits their feminism. Marriage and patriarchy are different institutions even though they affect each other. I think alternative models of marriage where the woman holds power may be a more effective way to circumvent the patriachy than women choosing not to get married.
In the matter of names, the name-surname system is the actual flaw. The patriarchy only makes this bad in the same way it colours everything else. If women were considered the head of the family, we’d still have the same problem of what to name the kids.
The name-surname system is a colonial import. Most African societies had their own naming traditions, often using given names, patronymics, or clan names rather than fixed surnames. Some of these systems were patriachal, but I say this to highlight that we had other models.
Individual families should get to choose what surname to use for themselves and their kids. It is the onus of the state to accommodate for family units with different surnames.
In the absence of real political organization, individual women cannot be expected to abide by feminist expressions that do not reflect their values or contribute to their agency. If someone chooses to change their surname, it should not discount their feminism. However, I think it should be a conscious choice not an expectation.
I believe there’s an unwritten societal expectation that women should change their surnames within certain institutions e.g. Christianity. And I think this should be tackled within those institutions, not outside of it.

Notes from Lanu

Marriage is an institution, patriarchy is a system. Not sure if those words are interchangeable but in my head, they are different.
In our world currently (especially in Nigeria), patriarchy upholds the default marriage structure. Once a woman gets married, the power dynamic shifts because within that institution, men hold all the power. Some women are only lucky to have husbands who choose not to utilise all the power they have.
Those who do have husbands who utilise all their power, have no one within society come to their aid if they complain because we live in a patriarchal society. And even for husbands that don’t choose to lord their power over their wives, their family, friends and even the immigration officer at MMA will do it on his behalf.
So basically, until that changes, there can’t be a marriage structure where women hold power.
What I understood recently though is that you can talk about feminism all you want with a potential spouse and agree on how you want your marriage to be but after the day you say, “I do”, you can only just pray that he sticks to it.
Also, the only way a woman can get her power back is to get divorced but it’s no coincidence that this is only position a woman can be in society. It’s actually better to not have been married.