WHAT’S IN A NAME?
The most radical teacher I ever knew was a Ms. She read us Plato and Janet Frame and ran yoga with us on the playground, but it was being a married Ms that made her revolutionary in my mind. Lured by the simplicity of the “girls can do anything” feminism of the 1980s, not changing your name when you got married seemed to me then an obvious choice; a simple thing you could do to make a big statement about women’s equality. It wasn’t what everyone was doing — most of the married women I knew when I was young had taken their husband’s name — but I did assume it would become the norm.
I was 39 when I tied the knot for the first time in 2018. Signs remain
