05/27/2024
Female “Juniors” are rare. But for some mothers, passing down their name is a no brainer, Maggie Mertens writes. (From 2022) https://theatln.tc/EulF08OZ
For certain mothers, sharing a name with a child is an intrinsically feminist act simply because it’s unexpected in our society. When Susannah Wilson began to spell her daughter’s name for the hospital record-keeper, the person interrupted, insisting that Wilson was giving her own name, not her baby’s. “My brother’s a Junior … and his whole life, no one bats an eye when he and my dad give their names,” Wilson tells Mertens. Historically, names have been patrilineal because they were often a way of proving property ownership, inheritance, and reputation. What’s more, in the fictional pop-culture world, when girls are named after their mother, the act tends to be used to portray eccentricity. Lorelai Gilmore of “Gilmore Girls” named her daughter after herself, though her daughter admits on the show that “personally I think a lot of Demerol also went into that decision.”
Naming a daughter after a mother isn’t a modern phenomenon; in some cultures, the tradition of matrilineal naming goes back centuries, Mertens notes. In Ireland, and several other European countries, it was commonplace to name the first daughter after the maternal grandmother, the second daughter after the paternal grandmother, and the third daughter after the mother. The practice is also prevalent in many Spanish-speaking countries, where it’s common to carry on both parents’ last names as well. Destry Maria Sibley, a media producer, is named after her mother, who was born in Mexico. Sibley was born and raised in Maine in the 1980s, however, and she says having the same first name as her mother was not normal. “The fact that my mom continued that custom while we were living in a place where that would seem very strange … I just think that’s very cool,” Sibley tells Mertens. She hopes that more American mothers “will at least question why it is basically taken for granted that it’s a thing men will do but not women.”
Read more: https://theatln.tc/EulF08OZ
