Gender, lineage, and surnames

I've neglected the blog for far too long, I know. It's hard for me to think of clever things to write about, sometimes. Or even not-entirely-stupid things to write about. So let me stop writing about writing and start writing about gender.

In the Basow reading we had for Tuesday, the author discussed a connection between the rise of an Agrarian society and the decline of the rights of women. As advances in agriculture led to personal wealth, not just living from meal to meal, the importance of ensuring family ties grew and grew. And rather than doing this matrilineally--logically--, most cultures developed a system where wealth was passed from father to son.

Because this all occurred long before the advent of Jerry Springer and the paternity test, there was no sure way to know who fathered a certain child. The only positive proof of parenthood was the fact that the mother had given birth to the child. However, this still didn't lead to wealth being passed form a mother to her children, even though it was only possible to completely, 100% ensure who the female parent of any child was. Instead, men still passed on their wealth, and to be as sure as they could that a child was theirs, they imposed harsh restrictions on women's sexuality.

If a woman was only having sex with one man, then her children would be his. Of course, this is hardly a foolproof method, but it's still the method that's prevailed the world over since the advent of private property. It's a system that essentially turns women themselves into property, and it's still prevalent today, with estimates of misattributed paternity between one and three percent.

And yet our heritage is still taken through the paternal line. Children are given their father's name, and women take their husband's name at marriage. In Czech names, female surnames are possessive adjectives, their father's or husband's name with an added "ova" to change the part of speech. It's such a prevalent, necessary system in that language that the names of women from other countries are altered in the news, so that "Michelle Obama" becomes "Michelle Obamova."

It's a bizarre system when you consider maternal lineage is the only lineage that can be proven at birth. Hopefully as we progress, society will break from this strict adherence to patronyms. Women aren't property, and our system of naming shouldn't function as if we are.