The issue of the name resurfaces any time I experience an identity crisis. At nineteen, while applying for a passport, I discovered that my name was not spelled on my birth certificate as it was on my driver’s license, and as I had always spelled it. So I changed it to the birth-certificate version. That name change, which involved simply adding an “e” to my middle name, caused only a ripple of concern.

Upon marrying, however, the surname change – from Valentine to Simson – felt more radical, and I experienced it as a loss. At the time, the pleasure of marriage seemed to compensate for a bit of identity confusion. No woman I knew had kept her family name when she married.

Shortly after we married, I flew alone to Wisconsin to be bridesmaid for a college friend. Waiting in the airport for the bride-to-be’s family, a rather desperate plea pierced my reverie: “Jo Anne SIMSON, PLEASE report to the courtesy desk.” I realized they were paging me, Jo Anne Valentine, so recently become Mrs. Simson that I didn’t recognize the name.

 

Only when my marriage began to falter and then crumble, dissolving into the chaos of divorce, did the issue of the name resurface. Although I had been working and paying the bills while my husband was a graduate student, our credit was in his name. After the separation, I was refused credit and, as a single mother with limited income, was forced to establish a new personal and economic identity.

For practical reasons, I kept the married name instead of reverting to my maiden name. My daughter’s last name was, after all, the same as her father’s; keeping that name seemed the easiest option. So I entered graduate school with the name Jo Anne Simson. Obtaining the Ph.D. solidified the name for me; it encoded the personal and academic struggles of a decade. However, on several occasions, I have been unable to locate a female colleague in a professional directory or meeting roster because I didn’t know her married name. It inhibits professional networking among women when colleagues can’t locate a person who has changed her name.

A few years after finishing graduate school, I remarried. This was during the early ’70s, before that decade’s full wave of feminism crested. Everyone assumed I would change my name, but I was determined not to change it again. I had established credit and had earned my Ph.D. in that name.

I initially resisted the marriage proposal, saying, “I might consider getting married again, but I don’t really want to change my name.”

What won me, I believe, was his response: “Well, you shouldn’t have to change your name if you don’t want to.” So I went to a lawyer and had a document drawn up enabling me to retain the name I already possessed.

Everyone thought it was strange, keeping a first husband’s last name when marrying another. Most of the children in the neighborhood addressed me as Mrs. Smith. Their parents found it scandalous that I did not have my husband’s last name.

 

My sister had two name-change crises during her early life. The first happened while she was still in grade school. She decided to change her name when she realized that she was being called by a name given her belatedly by our father. The name did not remotely correspond to the name on her birth certificate. Our father had been conveniently absent at the birth but had decided to give her a different name when Mother brought her home. My sister managed the transition to her real name by simply refusing to answer anyone who addressed her by the other name.

Her identity crisis was no doubt precipitated, in part, because she was in rebellion against our father’s often autocratic parenting style. Her rebellion didn’t abate until much later, after she had married in secret, having become pregnant at age 18, a taboo of major proportions in the 1950s. When her marriage and condition were revealed, she was disowned and expelled from the house, and my father took all her personal belongings to the local dump. Thus, when she married, she lost her identity in a great many ways: her name, her clothing, her books, her photographs, her mementos.

 

Ours is a country with a history of changeable names and flexible identities –  except perhaps among New Englanders and Anglo-Scots-Irish South-Easterners. An immigrant’s name might have been changed intentionally, perhaps to hide from a disagreeable past, or by accident, because a customs official could not spell the foreign name. In many cases, the change was not contested because the past had been an unpleasant reality from which the newcomer was fleeing.

 

Among African-Americans, though, the name change ruptured a connection to a past culture from which they had been torn most unwillingly. Moreover, the name change signified an identity conversion from personhood to property. A woman’s name change upon marriage also carries, historically, these same (rarely articulated) implications: Leave your past behind. You are now property, not a person. Your identity is tied to that of your master.

 

I was active in Amnesty International in the 1980s. Our group had a prisoner of conscience who was imprisoned in Bulgaria for refusing to change from his Turkish name to the Slavic name assigned him by the government. He was so impassioned about keeping his name that he was willing to go to prison rather than forego that key symbol of his identity and heritage. His personhood was intimately entwined with the name by which he had always been known, and he could not imagine an authentic life without it.

 

The issue of the name resurfaced when I began writing fiction and poetry. On scientific articles I used the name J.A.V. Simson; I had fewer hassles from reviewers and editors if initials preceded my surname. A few colleagues who knew me only through the scientific literature expressed surprise when we met and they realized I was a woman.

Since about half the fiction I have written is set in the laboratory, and the stories are often not flattering to the practitioners of science, I didn’t want to jeopardize my professional position by using the same name that was on research articles. It didn’t seem like a very personal name anyway; it was the last name of an ex-husband whom I hadn’t seen in years.

My maiden name was Jo Anne Valentine.  But the literary inclination came largely from my mother, whose maiden name was Helen Pascoe, and she had earned an M.A. in English from Bryn Mawr. Her mother’s maiden name was Fern Temple. I can’t trace it any farther back than that.

I thought perhaps Pascoe would be a good literary name. I tried it in combination with Valentine, yielding the possibilities Pascoe Valentine and Valentine Pascoe. A friend preferred the latter, since Valentine could be a first name and was not gender-specific. Eventually it was abbreviated to V. Pascoe. I don’t think of it a pseudonym, but rather as a literary name, because it doesn’t seem like a false name. I see it as the name of my literary self, and it now seems odd to publish fiction or poetry with another name.

The name was intended to honor my mother and the literary career she didn’t have, as well as my matrilineage. When I showed her my first story published in a national literary magazine, she read it and said, “Well, dear, it’s not the sort of story I would have written.” We honor as we can.

Literary pseudonyms have been widely used by female writers: George Eliot, George Sand, Isak Dinesen – all women hoping to be taken more seriously by using male names. Even Jane Austen was published as “Anonymous” until after her death. Some male authors have also used this device. O. Henry, certainly one of the great American short story writers, was really William Sidney Porter. Or was he? Perhaps he was really O. Henry. And what about Mark Twain (a.k.a. Samuel Clemens)? After all, what could be more natural than using a pseudonym for fiction?

Currently, I’m again faced with a dilemma about the name. My children are grown. I have retired from scientific research. The name continuity is no longer important to me. I have considered assuming my maiden name once more. And I have begun writing non-fiction. Now what should be my name? Who is it, here, now, writing this?

Would a consistent name, retained for life, offer women a more secure sense of personal identity? What would be wrong with giving daughters their mothers’ surnames, and sons, their fathers’? It would certainly reflect a deeper biological reality.

 

Author's Comment

This piece was originally written as a meditation on women and names because I was working on a nonfiction book and was trying to decide what name to use in publishing it. More specifically, I wondered whether or not to use my maiden name. I suspect many women have experienced similar issues with a new name when they marry – or questioned what name to use if they divorce.