Legal Status and Women: Do We Really Want It?

I fixed my blog. I know, I know, it's white. But in a non-scientific study, I found that Web sites and blogs with a light colored background are easier to read. That's just my opinion. Me, I am the informant for the casual study, which was based entirely on personal feelings.

It took several hours but I've adjusted the majority of fonts and type color from past entries. Hopefully everything is visible and readable now. I clearly live in a fantasy world to think that people actually read this blog, let alone go back and read old posts. I assume that because I'm the reading sort of person, others read too.

In any case, I vow to never have a black blog again. It's a bad idea. Another bad idea is changing the text from the default color to a new color. Other people may realize this on their own, intelligent as they are, but if you change the default type color, when and if you change your blog template (as I have done so many times), the default type color doesn't change with the new settings. You have to go in and manually change it on each post. That takes a long time if you have many posts.

Something else that's been bothering me, though not of the blogging world -- the bother of changing your name when you get married. Ok, so it took me a year and a half to do this, and I was pushed into doing it by circumstances: I needed a social security card. I lost mine when I was thirteen or thereabouts. I put off changing it because it's a hassle, really. It's not that I have much against changing my name, I don't. Sure, I had boyfriends in the past who turned it into a power struggle and felt no empathy for the identity struggle of changing your name, and so I was violently against it. But Stoker's a doll and he's right there with me on the few feminism ideologies that I subscribe to. So I have never felt that I had to prove a point.

When I was depositing Stoker's check today (he'd signed the back of it and everything), the bank teller had some silly issue with my license (old last name), the name I'd signed on the deposit slip (new last name), and the fact that it was Stoker's check. It was nothing really, but it got me all annoyed about the name change crap. First of all -- and I could go on about this for hours, I don't know why I'm bring it up now-- back in the day, women had no legal status. I'm sure they didn't have contracts and social security cards and passports and credit cards and check books and driver's licenses and savings accounts and all that crap that is so gloriously liberating for the modern woman. So it was no big deal to change the name. Now it's a nightmare.

That's it, it just bothered the hell out of me as I left the bank. I thought about how things have changed for women in the past one hundred years and how great it is. But it's also irritating as hell for all the things that haven't changed.

I guess the saying is true: you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Oh and to answer the question about legal status, yeah we do want it. You'd have to be joking to think I could seriously consider going back to when women were on a par, legally and socially, with luggage.