Must I Commit The Unthinkable Horror Of Addressing Women By Their Names?
Civil Behavior, April 30 2013:
Dear Civil Behavior: I’ve been helping my daughter plan her wedding to her girlfriend and everything’s been going fine — until now. We’re about to address the invitations. The calligrapher is lined up and time is getting a bit short. Here’s the problem. My daughter insists on addressing the women with what I’d call a feminist version of their names. In other words, instead of writing “Mr. and Mrs. Richard Garcia” she wants to write: “Ms. Jane Garcia and Mr. Richard Garcia,” calling out the identity of the woman separately from her husband. I’ve explained that this is incorrect etiquette and that my friends will be confused if not offended. But she won’t listen to me. Do lesbians and gays have different rules for this sort of thing?
— New York Mother-in-Law-to-Be
Dear New York Mother-In-Law-to-Be,
To say that lesbians and gays have different etiquette rules than normal, polite straight people is an understatement, if we are to believe your daughter's callous and uncouth regard for the long and respectable tradition of women's identities being wholly subsumed by that of their legal husbands, who bestow upon them their true worth.
Men are humans and women are valuable, pie-making attachments whose contributions should not be overlooked, but neither should they be rudely treated like autonomous people. To write a married woman's full name on a piece of correspondence intended to be received by her would imply that she somehow exists in a universe without her husband, the person who makes her whole and without whom she would be a helpless shell of skin.
