Contenu du sommaire : Le nom des femmes

This article examines the ways in which women were given names in Ancient Greece, and how sex difference operated in the context of naming practices. It draws on epigraphs and in particular honorific decrees – texts carved in stone and often placed in public spaces – honouring a person for his/her actions benefiting the city. Women were chiefly honoured in this type of text if they held a religious position, such as priestess. Starting from an Athenian decree honouring a priestess by the name of Timokrite, this study will explore the role of gender, by examining the manner in which priestesses were chosen and asking what this procedure indicated about their status and function. It will show that certain women were able, in their role as priestess, to have citizen status and carry out the political functions of a magistrate.

Did giving a saint's name to a child at baptism signify a special link between one or both parents and the saint, or was it a way of establishing patronage between the saint and the baptised child? Did it mean proposing a moral and religious role-model for the child, in which case the Italian practice of feminizing the names of male saints appears at odds with this aspiration? Or did those who chose the name intend above all to honour the saint so as to receive in return « honour and profit » themselves, thus strengthening the link with the saint through the name they were bestowing on their child? This article draws on baptismal registers and family records from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence, as a contribution to the debate on differences in naming practices between Mediterranean countries and those of further north in Europe.

This article deals with two aspects of naming practices in Jewish Ashkenazi communities in the Middle Ages: on one hand, as an identifying feature to signify belonging to a religious group, and on the other in relation to gender and gender assignment. Various specifically gendered legal rules and customs were brought to bear on a child's name: in the historical sources, Jewish men were identified as much by their « holy » Hebrew name as by their usual first name, and sometimes by a nickname, whereas women were usually identified simply by their everyday first name. According to Jewish law, men were, in their Hebrew name, reproducing their father's name; matronymics were rarely given and only as an addition to their usual name. Women on the other hand were identified by their husband's name. As for pet names and nicknames, they were comparable as between girl and boy children.

From the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, French feminists began to approach the question of women's names from a perspective of equality and personal identity embracing the processes of naming, changing one's name, and filiation, in other words considering a person's name as linked to reputation, identity, and personality ; particular questions concerned pseudonyms, married women's names, the titles Madame and Mademoiselle, and the transmission of one's surname. Focusing on particular moments in the debate and campaigns relating to women's names, this article traces a conceptual genealogy running from the Belle Époque to the early twenty-first century. The radical discourses and practices of the Belle Époque, those of Hubertine Auclert and Clémence Royer in particular, set the terms of a debate taken up by moderate feminists and state feminism in France from the 1970s on, and also by radical feminists aiming for legislative and administrative change (1985, 2002, 2012, 2013). Over and above the legal position, egalitarian practices and the inscription of women's names in the public arena remain among the aims of French feminism.

French law no. 2002-304 (4 March 2002) on the reform of family names, which came into effect in 2005, enables parents registering a birth in France to give their child either the father's surname, the mother's surname, or a “double name” formed of both parents' surnames “combined in the order of their choice, but limited to one family name for each parent”. This new law means that women can now hand down their surnames to the next generation. Based on a qualitative survey of around 50 people who gave a double surname to their child, this article shows how women who marry can take advantage of this new law without being obliged to abandon their own birth name in order to share a surname with their children, which is generally an option they would prefer. This article studies the handing down of double family names, not in legal terms, but based on the situation of women who choose this option.

The French Civil Code has, since June 2013, allowed same-sex couples to marry, to adopt jointly, and to proceed to the adoption of a spouse's child. Despite these considerable changes in French family law, the Civil Code does not take on board every type of situation. Such is the case, for example, when two women resort to assisted reproduction with sperm donation, or when two men resort to a surrogate maternity, all such couples having jointly planned to start a family. So the choice of their child's surname and first name is an opportunity to affirm kinship ties for same-sex families. Examining some individual situations reveals the characteristics of same-sex couples with regard to naming the children, but also the differences between father-couples and mother-couples. While previous research has hitherto indicated that in France mothers are not greatly concerned about passing on their own surname to their children, this study reveals that lesbian mothers by contrast pay a good deal of attention to this and sometimes register the surname of the non-biological mother in the first position. The characteristic feature of such families is that when the registration regulations allow, they are promoting the transmission of women's surnames.

Using examples drawn from a particular enslaved family in Réunion and Mauritius, this article considers how the gendered selection of both given and family names marked status and signaled or obscured kinship. While enslaved fathers enjoyed no legal status as parents under French colonial law, the names of slaves and their descendants enshrined maternal relationships in the use of gendered family names. Since the slave status of children rested on the condition of the mother, colonial archives often maintained a record of the maternal line while obscuring the memory of fathers – whether enslaved or free – of enslaved children. As the number of freedmen and their descendants increased in the early nineteenth century, it became common practice to adopt a mother's given name as a surname. Thus, the feminization of family names for the descendants of slaves codified an inherited inequality that may subject individuals to informal discrimination even in the present day.

Based on a survey carried out in the Nantes region of France, consisting of interviews with married women of different ages, it was possible to plot the changes that have taken place over the space of two to three generations in the practice of adopting a husband's surname, and the meaning conferred on it by married women. The study shows how adopting a married name, which was once automatic and accepted in a context of relative indifference, is tending today to become a considered choice, and invested with meaning by those women who do adopt it.

Studies in anthropological onomastics generally take names as a guide to understanding social and cultural practices in a given community. The specific status of women in the Early Middle Ages suggests that their names might help us to understand their status. The sparse nature of the documentation does not make this easy. Nevertheless, by considering names, it is possible to analyse the role of women in kinship patterns: indeed, they had much more difficulties than men to transmit their names to their descendants and also to transmit the names of their forebears, except in cases of hypogamy. It would however be rash to assume the existence of radical differences betwen the names of men and women, and equally risky to attach gendered meaning to names.

The study of naming practices offers valuable information about power relations between the sexes and the process of their symbolic differentiation. Men and women may have powers of naming that vary as between societies. Such power may reinforce or counterbalance the structuring effect exerted by any given kinship system on intra-family relations, and may convey a image of greater or lesser prestige for men and women. It is also possible to study inequality between the sexes, by observing the differences which may sometimes exist in the construction, symbolic content and use of male and female given names. But the name can also be a powerful weapon, including for women in patrilinear societies, in the battle of the sexes, or rivalry between persons of the same sex. The extreme case of societies where it is possible to take a name usually given to the opposite sex offers an opportunity to test the performative theory of naming, whereby the name creates the gender, and to perceive some of the factors by which the gender effects of a name may vary.

This article examines the political reverberations of the Athenian Festival of Thesmophoria, celebrated exclusively by women. It demonstrates how, in a ritual context, women might intrude upon the political space of men's deliberations. Starting from a comparative analysis of some passages in Aristophanes' ‪ ‪Thesmoporiazusae‪ ‪ and Aeschylus's ‪ ‪Eumenides‪ ‪, it will first review the hypotheses formulated by archaeologists about the physical location of the festival. It has been associated with the Pnyx or the Eleusinion; we propose to locate the celebration in the civinity of the Council of the Areopagus of Athens on the western side of the Acropolis, and on the very hill of the Areopagus. It ‪ ‪will then compare the deliberative acts carried out by Athenian male citizens and the women's rituals as described in representations of the Thesmophoria. It will explore the possibility that “deliberation” of a politico-judicial character enacted by women, as described in Aristophanes' play, reflects a possible women's discourse which could be perceived as parallel or “similar” to that of men. Following a suggestion in the work of Christophe Faraone, it asks whether the feast of Thesmophoria could, in this context, constitute a place where Athenian women were concretely handling “justice”. In conclusion, reference will be made to possible alternative discourses produced by women in this space lying at the civic and political heart of the city.‪