There’s been quite a bit of discussion about unisex names in the name-blog community recently, such as Appellation Mountain’s In Defense of Riley Anne and Evan Marie: Ten Reasons Boys’ Names on Girls Are Not a Sign of End Times and Waltzing More than Matilda’s Help! A Girl Stole My Boy Name!
As both articles point out, using a boy’s name for a girl is not a new phenomemon. It was actually common in the Middle Ages, and while Latin feminine forms were often used in formal records (Pipe Rolls, Court Rolls, etc), there is plenty of evidence to show that most, if not all, girls who appear as Alexandra, Philippa and Nicholaa, etc were in fact called Alexander, Philip and Nicholas. Nicholas is known to have survived as a girl’s name in Scotland into the Early Modern Period.
Next, the names of surname origin. Girls have been given surnames as first names since the trend first began in the 16th Century. Douglas Howard, Lady Sheffield (d.1608) is a good early example. They have been used as girls’ names ever since. Not on a par with their use for boys, perhaps, but still examples exist from every generation until the 19th, since when it has been growing. And many other names have a long history of use as unisex names – Julian and Christian, for instance, while now considered boys’ names, were both more commonly found as girls’ names in the Middle Ages.
So why shouldn’t a girl be given any name of surname origin now any less than then? And what does it matter that it first became known as a boy’s name – or a girl’s name? But the latter rarely crops us as an issue, because the anti-unisex camp have one terror and one terror alone – boy’s names used for girls. Full stop. End of. It is a terror of a name becoming considered ‘girly’ or ‘too feminine’ – not becoming ‘boyish’ or ‘too masculine’. The underlying fear being that a boy so named will himself become ‘girly’ and ‘feminine’…
At the heart of all of this lies a much deeper issue of far greater concern. The fact that, when we are supposed to be living in an age of equality between the sexes, society puts pressure upon parents to differentiate between boys and girls from birth far more intensely than ever before. A hundred years ago, women didn’t have the vote in most of the English-speaking world, and yet if you encountered a toddler in a park, you would have struggled to tell whether it was a boy or a girl without asking. They were dressed identically; little boys often had their hair in curls, little girls in bobs. It wasn’t even uncommon in past centuries for boys to be dressed in pink. And yet when one brave Canadian family decided to recreate this ‘genderlessness’ of a baby (if you missed it, here is the UK Daily Mail’s typically horror-stricken account), they are met mostly with cries of outrage and out-pourings of ridicule.
Unsurprisingly, it’s largely the anti-unisex name faction who are most likely to disapprove of little boys with long hair, little boys playing with dolls, little boys wearing pink, or dressing up in Disney princess dresses. What they don’t seem to realise is that regardless of what sex we are, we all have feminine and masculine sides – and this is nothing to do with sexual-orientation. The East acknowledges it in Yin and Yang. But here in the West, millennia of ruthless, patriarchal rule – in which half the population was essentially enslaved just because of their sex – have deeply indoctrinated society into hacking the feminine aspect out of boys from birth.
No wonder the West is in such a mess.
Attitudes such as this reveal that we are still far from achieving equality. If you’re in the anti-unisex name camp, just pause, and ask yourself these questions:
- Why, precisely, do we need to differentiate between the sexes in a name at all? Why does it matter for you to be able to tell what sex someone is on paper? Isn’t it the person themselves, their qualities, talents, interests, expertise etc, that matter?
- What exactly is wrong with ‘feminine’? Why is it wrong to allow a boy to connect with his feminine side, when it is a fact that a man who is in touch with his feminine side is more likely to resolve issues through discussion than through force or violence?
I’ll end with a quote from the American novelist Dorothy Allison: Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside. Eradicating all this nonsense from names would certainly be a good place to start.
Great information from history! And for people who think boys names on girls are “trashy” – *cough cough* did you see it was LADY Douglas????!!!
(I think the portrait is of a boy toddler, just a guess. It seems to have a boyish air about it).
Absolutely (well, technically, she was the Honourable Douglas, Lady Sheffield, but that’s hair-splitting!). There are others too; using surnames as first names began with the aristocracy for both sexes.It was first strongly linked with inheritances, and with a connection with the family – but they were STILL surnames, and some of them were STILL girls…
As for the portrait, it’s really impssible to tell! There are portraits of little girls who look just like this, and little boys that look ‘girly’ ;D.
Here we use Lady Whatever as the standard thing, even though we know it’s not correct ….. I think we think it sounds friendlier or nicer or something!!!
I think in the US too, surnames-on-girls started off as a consciously “upper class” thing to do. (At least in some areas).
I know you can’t really tell, it’s just intuition or whatever. It’s not it’s appearance, I just get a masculine vibe or aura from it. Quite unscientific!
“Why is it wrong to allow a boy to connect with his feminine side?”
Because unconsciously we are brought up to believe that women are inferior to men. If a girl plays with a boy’s toy or wears a boy’s colour then she is raising her status. She is a tomboy, somebody to be admired.
But if a boy plays with a girl’s toy or likes pink then he is lowering his status to that of a girl and is open to ridicule as a result. He can’t *possibly* want to be like a girl, so he must be “gay” or “transgendered” or some other label.
As a society we take this distinction incredibly seriously – “Is it a boy or a girl?” is always one of the first questions to be asked. And most of us would say we believed in equality between men and women. Yet the boy in pink or the man in a dress remains ridiculous, and will most likely continue to do so.
Exactly! Is it all that unconscious either? It’s the same reason why it’s considered acceptable for women to wear trousers, have short hair, wear blue, etc, but unacceptable for men to wear skirts (except kilts – and I’ve even witnessed a man in a kilt greeted with ridicule), have long hair (if they wish to be ‘taken seriously’), and, as you say, wear pink or – dare I even say it? – flowers?
I live in hope, though. After all, less than a hundred and fifty years ago, it was considered a ludicrous notion to allow women to own property or become doctors, never mind vote. Times ARE changing, I know a lot of people who are consciously working against these old, deeply embedded, rotten attitudes and beliefs. It will take time, no denying it – but it WILL be different one day.
This is a fascinating read, but I think its anti-West bias sounds rather naive. I grew up in India where the kind of patriarchal society you condemn in your article is still much more active and visible there than it is in most countries typically identified as Western. And no, that is not a result of British rule (which memorably condemned the hindu practive of Sati, or wife burning); instead, it’s part of the dominant, caste-base culture that’s only slowly beginning to disintigrate. I used to get so frustrated growing up of the incredibly strong divide between what was perceived as acceptable for a young boy to do and what was acceptable for us girls.
We see the same preferencing of males over females in China, where the one-child policy has led to the tragedy of villages filled with young men desperate to get married but unable to find a wife. This same preferencing can also be seen in Korea, where it is not uncommong for parents whose first-born is a daughter to give the girl a boy’s name because it is believed that by so doing they will have a greater chance of having a boy the next time.
I only mentioned three cultures because those are the cultures that I’m most familiar with. I’m sure other examples exist. So while there are definitely many, many, MANY valuable things to be learnt from these cultures, it’s unfair to accuse the West alone of gender bias.
It certainly wasn’t my intention to imply that gender bias is only found in the West. Very, very far from it! I cannot think off the top of my head of a single country where gender bias doesn’t exist to a greater or lesser degree. Some are truly terrible, like Afghanistan. India’s recovery from the caste system is a particularly interesting comparison, though — officially, there is no caste system any more, but in practice, it still underlines most things, as you say. But the point I was simply making that in the West, we have supposedly achieved equality, supposedly put discrimination behind us, and yet, beneath the surface, it is still there, even though many people aren’t aware of it, and it manifests in attitudes such as this regarding names — that if a boy’s name becomes regarded as a girl’s name, it undermines it’s value and usability for boy’s, and that an established girl’s name is never consciously bestowed on a boy, because, as Chris said in a previous comment, girls and all things feminine, unconsciously or not, are still considered inferior.
Or if a “girl’s” name is bestowed on a boy then it is open to condemnation or ridicule.
Great article which highlights the double standard.
A couple of points to add. I think early on kids are far more accepting of other children with different names, but they can pick up their cues from adults. However, I think once puberty hits, irrespective of the influence of adults kids genderize themselves too, and I suspect it’s part of the growing sexual awareness. At this point boys with girls names for example are under more peer pressure to “prove” their masculinity. I am not sure how it is for girls with boys names.
Thanks! Thoroughly agree with what you say about the attitude of children and influence of adults. Interesting theory about boys with feminine names feeling the need to ‘prove’ their masculinity as they get older, would be interesting to investigate. If it is the case, I suspect it very much depends on the sort of community the child grows up in, and the attitudes of those around him — as in all things. I do know that the research that has been done into ‘boy called Sue’ syndrome found it wasn’t anything like as damaging as the baying crowds would have it.
[…] In the — shall we say — more conservative naming crowd, using surnames as first names is almost as big an anathema as that most heinous crime of all: using boys’ names for girls! […]
[…] as a personal name since the 16th century, and from early on was also used as a name for girls (see Nook of Names’ article on unisex names). It was a popular name in the 1920s-40s, but is now extremely […]