「经济学人」What's in a name?

But the law is still fuzzy

Ayse Cicek is not particularly fond of her surname, which means “flower” in Turkish. But she was even less pleased at the prospect of being forced to change it. In 2022, when she got engaged, Turkish law decreed that she would have to take her fiancé’s surname on marriage, or double-barrel it with her maiden name.

For Ms Cicek, 34, who works at a Turkish airport, that is problematic. It would mean changing four different security cards for her workplace, as well as her passport, driving licence, bank cards and national id. It is also an issue of principle. “A woman should not have to change her identity just because she has married,” she says. Feminists have campaigned against the law for decades, arguing that it clashes with the provisions in the Turkish constitution that enshrine equality between the sexes. Women have also surged into the workforce since the rule came in with Kemal Ataturk’s drive to Europeanise his new state. The justification for forcing women to take their husband’s name was to keep records and lines of lineage clear.

The issue was brought to Turkey’s constitutional court for the first time in 1998, and again in 2011. Since 2015, women who want to keep their surnames have been able to do so, but only by filing a court case against their new husbands, which many of them were not eager to do. In April 2023 the court finally came down in favour of changing the law, though not unanimously; Muammar Topal, one of the judges who rejected the change, said that equality between men and women is a “modern superstition”.

The scrapping of the original law finally came into force on January 28th. But although the old law has been repealed, parliament has not yet passed new legislation to replace it. So women who have married since January 29th find themselves in a legal grey zone. It also remains unclear whether the couple’s children are now able to take the wife’s name, or whether men may change their names to their wives’. As her June wedding approaches, Ms Cicek is preparing, reluctantly, to take her future husband to court.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "What's in a name?"(May 16th 2024)

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