Kumrie Gashi, like many women in Kosovo, changed her last name when she got married. All of the women in her family had done the same, and she hopes that this tradition will continue after her.
“Since I have come to live with my husband, in his house and he is the one who provides for the family, I consider that our family should be identified by his last name,” Gashi says.
Unlike in the past, nowadays a woman can choose to keep her maiden name, that of her husband or both. Register Office in the Municipality of Prishtina, does not possess the exact statistics of women that have kept their maiden name. Though, it is assumed that approximately 70% of women who got married since 2000, have kept both last names.
Sociologist, Linda Gusia considers that different factors, such as the education of women and their career, have contributed to women’s hesitation to change their last name. She is glad that many women are considering into consideration keeping their maiden name even after marriage, a phenomenon that in the past was not even discussed about.
“Definitely, the change of the mindset among some, when it comes to marriage is undeniably a factor. It’s not only that the wife moves to her husband’s home, but rather a union of two individuals, and as such perhaps does not imply the change of her last name”, Gusia says.
Gusia herself decided to keep her maiden name after marriage. She says that she never considered changing her last name, since she considered it as a part of her identity. The fact that she dealt with gender studies and she was aware that the patriarchal society functions by denying the identity of women, increased the relevance of her decision to not change her last name.
“For me, it was absurd that for a considerable period in your life you are someone, and once in love, and once you decide to live with someone else, you change your name, you decide to become someone else”, Gusia says.
According to her, some of the reasons why women change their last name could be their desire to be identified as a family with her husband, or feel uncomfortable with their maiden name and are not bound to it as much.
This doesn’t represent a problem as long as it is their own choice, and it’s not imposed by either the institutions or the family, she considers. It becomes problematic, Gusia says, when the institutions “limit the choices of citizens”.
She explains that together with her husband, they had decided to give their daughter both their last names, but that request was not approved by the Municipality of Prishtina. They were told that children can have only one last name. Institutions should do away with the patriarchal dimension that requires the change of name in order to show who the children and the wife belong to.
Sara Gashi-Koraqi didn’t find it so easy to drop the maiden name, which she had for 19 years. She wanted to keep her maiden name in order to remind her of her roots and her origin, and be at least a bit different from other women in her husband’s family. According to her, changing her last name would be a big transformation, given that people knew her by her maiden name. By keeping both names, people could identify her much easier, and also, would have realized that she’s been married, she thinks.
“My maiden name was a part of me, something that my family gave me long ago, and thus it seemed to me unfair not to keep it”, she says.
Fatime Avdiu, on the other hand, thought that keeping both would be too long of a name, so she decided to keep only her husband’s.
“It has always been like this. My mother and my grandmother have also changed their names and so did I”, she says.
Although she has changed her last name, she thinks that it would have been better if she didn’t do it. She suggests her daughter to keep her maiden name.
Bulza Capriqi
