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Waterfront views, decks, great living spaces, spa bathrooms, this home has it all! |
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A Tradition of Luxury and Grandeur
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Water's Edge offers the most spectacular views of the Manhattan skylines anywhere on the East River. |
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Carrying the most innovative invitation lines available today |
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From the moment you enter the marble and cherrywood lobby tower, you’ll know that your guests will enjoy our brand new accommodations. |
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Take on your husband’s surname?
By Sheila Feeney
When it comes to changing your name, what’s the name of the game for you?
About 90 percent of women around the country trade in their maiden names for their husbands. The rest may hyphenate, use their maiden name as a middle name (as Hillary Rodham Clinton chose), or keep their maiden name intact. Women who go the non-traditional route are also more likely to live in the Northeast. In certain rare instances, husbands may take the last name of their brides. One bridegroom took his bride’s last name because most of her family was wiped out in the Holocaust, and he wanted to help keep her family’s name and legacy alive. Another groom did it simply because he liked his wife’s name better than his own.
Below two women talk about their choices:
I Traded In My Maiden Name
“I don’t have any regrets about taking my husband’s name,” says Debora La Guardia, 34, of Smithtown, L.I. Her husband Michael La Guardia “is a wonderful man and I’m very proud of it. He’s very successful and provides for us so well. He’s just a wonderful guy.”
There was never any question in Debora’s mind that she would be trading in her maiden name – Bruder – for her husband’s, when she got married in 1993. She was a traditional girl, her husband was a traditional guy, and so, for that matter, was her father – who knew that Debora’s two brothers would carry on the family moniker for generations to come.
The paperwork for a new legal identity “was a pain in the neck,” recalls Debora, who had to change the names on her credit cards, driver’s license, and her new, joint bank account. (She has yet to refresh her passport or her health club membership with her current identity.) But, she rationalized, “It was neat to have this new name,” and publicly confirm her commitment to her husband. The name itself also appealed to her – although she never anticipated that she would be asked at least once a week whether she is a descendent of Fiorella La Guardia, the three-term mayor of New York City who served from 1934 to 1945. (Her husband doesn’t know if there’s a connection.)
Of course, a new identity comes with a new name. One example, everyone just assumes that Debra, now La Guardia, is Italian. “This is your name, but it’s not your heritage,” as Debora explains. The ethnic assumption is humorous, because Debora, who is not Italian by birth, makes a mean tomato sauce from scratch, which her husband – who was not raised with Italian home cooking – fails to appreciate. When differences between family customs and traditions cause tension, Debora says that sometimes she “feels” more like a Bruder than a La Guardia, but that feeling passes when differences are resolved.
Professionally, the change was inconsequential, says Debora, who quit her nursing job years ago to care for her kids full time. While at one time she disapproved of women keeping their names, experience has taught her not to be judgmental. When it comes time for her daughters to make such a decision, says Debora, “I wouldn’t have an opinion: It would be their decision.”
I Like My Separate Identity
Lisa Siccone, 45, of Bridgewater, N.J. legally hyphenated her name when she married in 1990. Yet, professionally and personally, she is known only by her maiden name. In effect, she has a different daily identity from her legal one.
According to the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and her health insurer, she is Siccone-Maglione. (“You get a side of ziti with that,” cracks the half-Irish, half-Italian radio broadcaster.) Yet, no one addresses her as anything other than Siccone. Okay, almost no one. Lisa’s own mother – a Siccone! – still insists on addressing all her birthday cards, “Lisa Maglione,” claiming she can’t remember that Lisa’s last name is the same as hers.
Lisa’s Italian-born husband had no issues with his feminist wife keeping her name. “It was irrelevant to him. I could never have fallen in love with someone who would have been against it: It would have been giving up my personhood.”
Sal isn’t thrilled when Lisa has made the dinner reservations and the maitre’d alerts “Mr. Siccone” his table is ready, but he deals. Her choice, she knows, is not universally approved of by the public. When explaining that she’s kept her maiden name, the occasional acquaintance will roll an eye or simper, “Ohhhh – are you one of THOSE?”
Yes, she is: A feminist and a proud one. Taking on one’s husband’s name, she explains, “is a tradition that goes back to when women were acquired as properties and had dowries and no rights.”
But isn’t keeping one’s father’s name also a vestige of patriarchy? Sure, she sighs, “but I had to start where I was.” When her dad died in her twenties, she became more determined than ever to hang on to “Siccone” should she get married. For the Roman Catholic ceremony, she had the priest delete the word “obey” from Sal’s vows and insisted they be pronounced not “man and wife,” but as “husband and wife.” The term of address she prefers, incidentally, is “Ms.”
When her daughter, Reid, was born seven years ago, a new challenge came along. “She and Sal had agreed that Reid would have “Siccone” for her middle name. But then, “two months before she was born, Sal’s mother died. He asked, ‘Couldn’t Maria be her middle name instead of Siccone?’ Now how can you say no to that?,” she asks.
For the first two weeks of school, Reid Maria Maglione wrote “Siccone” as her last name on school papers. That’s probably because she knew how to spell it, Lisa conjectures with a laugh. “A few weeks later, ‘Maglione,’ was back on top.”
Appellatory ambiguity runs in the family: While 60% of her friends and family call her Lisa, 40% know her as Elizabeth, her given first name. In the end, feminism can be tempered by pragmatism. “If I had a name like ‘Slutsky,’” says Lisa, “who knows – I might throw it right out the window.”
If you decide to change your name, you need to notify various government agencies so your name can be changed on official documents and identification cards. For one, you need to contact the Internal Revenue Service and state, “Please be advised that social security number (fill in the number here), formerly in the name of Mary Jones, should now read Mary Fisher.”
Request that a separate credit history be kept under each of your names – mention your husband’s name and then your name. This way you’ll have a credit rating of your own.
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