NO MAN should enter this arena lightly. But I wanted to know. Why do so many divorced women retain their husband‘s surname? The floodgates opened. Fortunately, none of the Facebook and Twitter respondents came at the questioner, though one did make the point that we should not blame women “again” for a societal problem. I learnt a lot from the responses to what clearly is a multilayered problem. The most common response was “the children”. When a couple get divorced and the children are still young, changing the surname of the child to the mother‘s or having two biological parents with different surnames creates confusion. So, said many women, we keep the name “for the sake of the children”. And where the husband goes off or remarries and makes another life, the irritation of his name remaining behind with subsequent children “is a bonus”, said one woman. What was disturbing, though, was the second-most common explanation — the Department of Home Affairs. “Try to change your name, J...
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