Salon’s advice columnist, Cary Tennis, recently published a letter from a woman debating whether or not to change her name to her husband’s when she got married. His suggestion was that she could of course do as she pleased, given that feminism has made it possible for women to make this choice, but that changing her name would be a betrayal of feminist principles.

The column provoked 242 posts in response before the thread was closed. I was disappointed in but not surprised at most of the responses. Many posters suggested that women should do whatever they please with regard to changing their names after marriage: keep her maiden name or change it to her husband’s if she wanted to, hyphenate, keep her maiden name and tack on her husband’s at the end, create a new name out of the two last names, etc. The vitriol came from the “feminists”, many of whom implied or outright said that women who take their husbands’ names are “doormats” and traitors to feminism.

One letter in particular, posted anonymously as “A Foreign Perspective”, really got my hackles up.

Taking your husband’s last name is a statement, whether you accept it or not. It is accepting that you are becoming his. This is why women are not allowed to keep their names in many countries outside the West. It matters. It’s not irrelevant.

…

…if you take his name, people will judge you. Do you want to know why? You call yourself a liberal feminist and then cling to archaic notions or traditionalism. You can’t have it both ways.

Lovely way to continue to subscribe to the status-quo while claiming to fight it. Attitudes like these are what give the patriarchy its power.

I can’t help but draw the parallel here to conservatives’ desire to constitutionally define marriage as a covenant between a man and a woman. Proponents of gay marriage wonder if conservatives see the institution of marriage as so weak as to not be able to withstand the perceived assault of gay people claiming the same right. You who claim that a woman cannot be a feminist and change her name to her husband’s after marriage: are you so insecure in your feminist ideals that you believe that my personal choice to change my name to my husband’s somehow threatens feminism itself? Feminism fought for the right of women to be able to keep their maiden names after marriage, therefore it’s my duty as a good feminist to keep mine? What kind of logic is that? How about this: feminism fought for the right of women to be able to abort unwanted fetuses, therefore as a good feminist, it’s my duty to have an abortion if I find myself with an unwanted pregnancy? I certainly see that kind of logic in Norway: feminism fought for the right of women to participate in the workplace and put their kids in pre-school when they turn one, so it’s therefore unfeminist to not work or to stay home to raise your own child. How, in this case, is the tyranny of that brand of feminism any less than the tyranny of the patriarchy? I thought feminists were fighting so that women would have choices, not so that women would have to live according to feminist precepts instead of patriarchal ones.

I’m a feminist because I believe that women should have the same choices as men should have, not because I believe that women should live their lives in the same way as the patriarchy decrees that men should live their lives. (And don’t believe for a minute that the patriarchy isn’t bad for men, too–how much respect does a stay-at-home dad get, or a guy who likes to wear hot pink?) There’s nothing progressive about requiring that one sex live by the same strictures forced upon the other sex. What’s progressive, what’s feminist, is working to make the world a place in which both men and women have the freedom to live their lives as they choose.

The graduate degree I was supposed to get fron UiO’s insitute for linguistics was in “Språk, logikk og informasjon”: Language, Logic, and Information. It was mostly geared towards studies in AI, but was the closest thing I could find to cognitive science or information architecture at the University of Oslo. I really enjoyed all the logic I took, and I really enjoyed the general linguistics stuff. I especially enjoyed the courses on human-computer interaction and the psychology of judgment and decision-making. I lost it when I took a class in formal semantics, though. That’s the only time in my life I’ve ever failed a class, and I failed it even though I read the textbook and understood the material (in my defense, it’s a lot easier to fail a course in the Norwegian system than in the US system, and I was so sick that I didn’t make it to any lectures). I hated that subject matter with the fire of a thousand suns. My master’s thesis was on prototype theory.

Washoe and Alex were pioneers in the field of linguistics.

Washoe was the first chimpanzee taught American Sign Language. She was raised in a human environment in the same way as a deaf child would have been raised. Her adopted son, Loulis, learned American Sign Language directly from her. You can read more about Washoe at her homepage.

Alex, an African Grey parrot, possessed reasoning skills equivalent to that of a five-year-old child. He could count, knew his colors, could identify many everyday objects and answer questions about them, and could even do math. He was even learning to read.

Alex has long been one of my favorite non-human characters in cognitive science research, along with Kanzi and Kismet. He’ll be greatly missed by many.

You can read more about Alex on his homepage.