I’d only ever been surrounded by women who didn’t have the blueprint for claiming their lives. There were my aunts, who would never be caught socializing without their husbands present—certainly not publicly. They couldn’t drive their cars without their husbands, let alone ride a motorcycle. And there was my mother, who was notified of her own name change only when her wedding invitations arrived from the printer. She stared at one for a few moments, wondering if my father had changed his mind and was marrying someone else instead. Without consulting her, he had decided that Yasmin would be a more suitable and elegant name for his wife than Frida. It was one of the first signs that her identity was disposable.
—Samra Habib, We Have Always Been Here
When he fell in love with her, Rossetti wanted to “improve” Lizzie, to make her more worthy of being his companion. One of the first things he did was to persuade her to change the way she spelt her surname. He convinced her that “Siddal” looked more genteel than “Siddall”, so Lizzie changed it permanently.
—Lucinda Hawksley, Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel
“Jane” wasn’t Mrs. H.G. Wells’s real name, Amy Catherine was her real name. H.G. didn’t like Amy Catherine, he rechristened her Jane, a name he thought embodied domestic ability. They were married close on forty years and Jane fulfilled H.G.’s domestic expectations. Yet sometimes he says he saw “[Amy Catherine] look at me out of Jane’s brown eyes, and vanish.” (H.G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography.)
On 23rd February, [Paula Modersohn-Becker] sets out for a longer stay in Paris. She wants to leave Otto Modersohn, and writes to Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom she had spoken about her plans: “And now, I don’t even know how I am supposed to sign my name. I am not Modersohn and I am not Paula Becker anymore either. I am Me, and I hope to become Me more and more.”
On my desk lies a white envelope with my name written on it: ‘Dr El-Saadawi, Visiting Professor, Duke University.’ The name Duke rings strange in my ears like that of Al-Saadawi. Who was Duke? A millionaire from North Carolina. Just before dying, he suddenly discovered he could not take his money with him to the grave, so he thought why not leave his name on a wall, or at the bottom of a statue? Why not pay whatever sum of money was required to ensure that his name would not be buried forever with him? But my mother’s name was buried forever. She owned nothing, had no money. According to divine and to human law, her children, including me, were her husband’s property. So, I never carried the name of my mother. Her name was buried with her body and disappeared from history.
—Nawal El Sadaawi, “God Above, Husband Below”
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