Big Whoop

Monday's Taiwan News and China Post both featured this story:  Despite new law, [Taiwanese] children are still being given father's surname

Taiwan's civil statutes were changed in May 2007 to allow children to adopt their mother's surname, heralded at the time as a breakthrough in this patriarchal society.

But the results of a poll released yesterday show that legal reform has failed to budge entrenched cultural attitudes, at least for the time being.

The poll found that only 4.3 percent of parents of newborn children took advantage of the new law over the past year and registered their children with the mother's surname, said the Awakening Foundation, the women's rights group responsible for conducting the poll.

"To promote equal rights between the two sexes on the issue of which of the parents' family names is used in naming children, Taiwan's society still needs to overcome both legal obstacles and cultural restraints," said foundation Chairwoman Fan Yun, in response to the results.  [emphasis added]

There are perfectly valid reasons why parents might want to give their child the mother's surname, so having a law like this on the books isn't a bad thing.  But I honestly don't see how Fan Yun thinks devoting her group's scarce resources to changing "cultural restraints" regarding this issue is going to change Taiwanese society one iota. 

(Well actually, I suppose it WOULD give newlyweds one MORE thing to argue about...) 

All right, let's suppose a law was passed here tomorrow, forcing children to take on the names of BOTH parents (as is the Spanish custom).  Just how would that make Taiwanese society any less patriarchal?  Anyone want to make the case for me that Spanish culture isn't patriarchal simply because of the convention they use for naming their offspring?

Really now.  I would think Taiwanese feminist groups had bigger fish to fry.

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Postscript:  Interesting trivia note -- Chinese families were apparently matrilineal up to around 1600 B.C.

Comments

This law would've saved me having to change my Chinese name to have the same surname as my wife. Otherwise my son's surname would have been the Chinese bastardization of my given name.

[The Foreigner]

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Hope I didn't give the wrong impression here. Like I said, having this law on the books is a GOOD thing in order to take care of certain cases like yours.

It's the over-reaching attitude that I object to: "We've simply GOT to change the whole Taiwanese cultural outlook so that exactly 50% of everyone born here will have the same surname as their mother. The great unwashed just aren't making the choices that we elitists think they ought to be making."

(BTW, is there any way I could have come up with a stupider title for this post? What the hell was I thinking?)

[Jarrod J]

It really does seem like a pointless fight--I won't argue either way about which society is more patriarchal, but let's not forget that in America, bastion of feminism that it is, pretty much all kids with married parents--and even many who unmarried ones--take their father's last names.

And plus, in Chinese society, don't the wives always keep their last names after marriage? Nobody's ever pointed to that as evidence that cultures where that isn't the common practice are somehow more oppressive.