Sonia Sotomayor Sort of Took Her Husband's Last Name
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One of the many interesting details in the Washington Post’s bio of Sotomayor yesterday involved her compromise over taking her husband’s name. The weird hybrid she came up with seems to embody all of her ambivalence about love, ethnicity, and being a workaholic woman. She married Kevin Noonan just before law school. He was Irish, and, like many women, she was mindful about losing her identity. (Emily quotes Margaret Mead on that subject here.) So she went with Sotomayor de Noonan, which to me sounds like a countess but was meant to be a nod to the Latin American construction. The result was the preservation of her ethnic identity at the expense of her feminist one. The decision was “not consistent with the feminist movement,” explains Jose Cabranes, one of her mentors. “It means belonging to.” They divorced after a few years.
Her second love story is full of similar poignant ambivalence. She was engaged for eight years to an architect, Peter White. When she was sworn into the 2nd Circuit, she surprised the crowd with a public love poem to him. “The professional success I had before Peter did nothing to bring me genuine personal happiness,” she said. But that relationship didn’t work out either. White told the Post that she is “extremely dedicated to her work,” and it took up “90 percent” of her time.
Photograph of Sonia Sotomayor by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images.
Hanna Rosin Double X co- editor, reporter, prefer my friends live.
Comments
Last May 26, 2009, President
By: Mikee_L | Sat, 08/01/2009 - 06:00
Last May 26, 2009, President Barack Obama announced his selection of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, to replace retiring Justice David Souter. People are anxiously awaiting news from the Senate hearings about the "Wise Latina" judge, nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States. Currently, the Senate committee handling Sonia Sotomayor hasn't confirmed her to the bench, but approved her to be voted on. In other words, they voted on whether or not she should be voted on. It seems to take payday loans at least to understand how these things work. She's been accused of being an activist judge, which is a code word for when a judge makes decisions that are legally valid that conservatives don't like, like backing civil rights, for instance. At any rate, Sonia Sotomayor won't need unsecured loans if she does take the Bench.
Kinda Sympathetic to the name change thing
By: KJ Dell Antonia | Mon, 07/13/2009 - 12:40
I'm sympathetic to Probable-Justice Sotomayor on this one, and actually think that was a pretty good compromise. I don't think "de" means "belonging to", I think it means "of the" as in, of the Noonan family--certainly true when she married into it and a nice alternative to the hyphen (I think in my case "Dell Antonia dell Seelig" might have been a bit much, though).
When we marry, we are creating a family, and lots of us, it seems, want to share a surname as well, but it's tough to abandon the name you've grown up with and created an identity around, even if, in the end, it's your father's. Especially if that name has a strongly ethnic feel that says something about you. I don't think we, as a society, have come up with a good way to work around this. I do know a few couples who came up with their own name, including one intrepid pair who chose a name from "Lord of the Rings", but that route runs some risk of mockery. I've made my call, but I'd love to give my daughter a better option.