The curious case of the married woman who applied for a permit in her name, meta dawn l-affarijiet suppost jaghmilhom il-kap tal-familja

F'Malta, ir-ragel huwa l-kap tal-familja

People have attributed all sorts of underlying motives to the fact that ‘Victor Scerri’s permit application’ was submitted in his wife’s name.

Victor Scerri’s permit application? The man is married. His rights over that property are 50 per cent. The other 50 per cent belongs to his wife.

She has as much right to submit a permit application as he does. But this is Malta, where ir-ragel remains il-kap tal-familja despite changes to the law.

When Kurt Sansone asked Victor Scerri a specific question about this (interview, The Sunday Times yesterday), he replied that he didn’t want his name on the application because those who had to deal with it might feel under undue pressure.

He wanted the application to be ‘anonymous’ for that reason, and not to conceal it from the press and environmental NGOs. It turns out he is being accused of the very thing he wanted to avoid.

Knowing how correct he is – and yes, he is – not only do I believe him, but I understand his reasoning. The man has been under fire, accused of all manner of wrong-doing, for more than two months.

His friends and associates all urged him to speak out and defend himself from attack, but he never did. His reply was always the same: that he wouldn’t speak out as political party president, because it would not be correct.

People took his silence not as the stance of integrity but as an admission of guilt (but guilty of what, exactly?).

When he understood that he could not remain silent any longer, because that in itself would embroil his political party in the controversy (which was going to happen in any case), he resigned and began to speak out.

But let’s leave aside those suspicions and allegations about the ‘wife’s name’ application for one moment. What interests me more than anything is what the reactions have revealed about our attitude towards the traditional roles of wife and husband, and our perception of a woman’s place in marriage.

It’s not much different to the attitude of our grandparents.

Despite the changes to marriage law in the 1990s – ‘shab indaqs fiz-zwieg’ – which removed the man as sole head and signatory of the household, we still think it’s the man’s place to take care of anything official.

Any woman who does so is ‘pushy’, a ‘zattata’, trying to ’emasculate her husband’ and ‘behaving like a man’.

If there is a permit application for the development of a house or land jointly owned by both spouses because it was purchased during their marriage, we think nothing untoward if the application is in the husband’s name alone.

Indeed, we fully expect it to be in the husband’s name alone, and if we see an application in the names of David and Julia Borg, our unspoken (and sometimes spoken) reaction is: ‘Kemm hi pushy dik il-mara, trid tizzattat fl-applikazzjoni ukoll.’

Strictly speaking, this is correct: when there is economic community in marriage (and not all marriages have economic community) it is necessary for only one spouse to apply and for one spouse’s name to be on the contract of purchase. But any woman with the slightest degree of self-respect is not going to allow this.

By insisting that her name goes down on the contract of purchase when she and her husband buy a flat or a house, or by putting her name on the permit application for development, she is making a statement: ‘Look here, I’m not just along for the ride.’

Some women are sick and tired of being ‘included’ in their husband’s name. Husbands are less sick and tired of being ‘included’ in their wife’s name, because it still has novelty value to them (‘dik il-mara li ghandi ma ssibx tarfa….‘, they’ll say of her, as though she’s a cheeky toddler).

So it says a lot about us that, if we were to see Victor Scerri’s name as the sole one on a permit application, we wouldn’t blink. After all, it’s the norm for men to act on behalf of their wives and for The Wife’s name to be left out of the loop. But when we see ‘Victor Scerri’s wife’s’ name as the sole one on a permit application – ah, then they must be up to tricks. Women don’t do these things. Married women are passive. They cede that role to the husband.

Even the way that Marthese Scerri Said has been referred to consistently as ‘Victor Scerri’s wife’ in every newspaper report and comment is deeply offensive and says a great deal about our backwoods-bunny thinking.

I remember a bit of a furore recently when a report on timesofmalta.com described a television company as being owned by ‘Andrew Farrugia and his wife’. The report was written by a man. There were some angry reactions on the comments-board – all from women. Wife = chattel.

More disturbing still to me – a married woman – was the constant reference to Mrs Scerri’s use of her ‘maiden name’. Even the term ‘maiden name’ is offensive nowadays. How many women are maidens when they marry? Not a great many, I’ll wager.

If Mrs Scerri used her ‘maiden name’ to apply for that permit, the reasoning went, then she was trying to cheat by going in disguise: the equivalent of a large pair of dark glasses and a wig. The people who said this kind of thing missed the very obvious point that a permit for development, like every other formality that must be dealt with in the realm of officialdom, from banks to voting, must show the precise details, name included, on your identity card.

You can’t just invent a name, or use your ‘maiden name’ when your identity card shows another surname.

So obviously, if the permit application was made in the name of Marthese Said, it follows that her identity card showed the name Marthese Said. But even though the law allows married women in this country to have a surname other than their husband’s, popular culture regards any such move as highly suspect.

Somebody later pointed out that there was an anomaly, because while the permit application showed the name of Marthese Said, the electoral roll – which also gives the details as shown on one’s ID card – lists her as Marthese Scerri Said.

There were more hos and hums and whispers of suspicion.

I think it’s best in these situations to find out the facts, rather than casting doubt a la Astrid Vella. This is what I discovered.

Said is not Mrs Scerri’s ‘maiden name’, but the name of her first husband. Before she married him, she was called Marthese Spiteri.

She was widowed in 1993 when she was only 27 years old, four months pregnant and with a toddler to care for. When she met Victor Scerri, she was a widow with two small children, one of whom had been born after his father died. She and Victor married in 1999.

At that time, the law did not allow Marthese to keep her first husband’s surname: it was either her father’s surname or her new spouse’s.

The law was changed after a test case instituted by one of my former classmates at St Dorothy’s, whose marriage ended in tragedy early on when her American husband died in a traffic accident, leaving her with a very young daughter. When she remarried, she wished to retain his surname for the sake of her daughter, but was not allowed to do so.

I remember thinking: if the second husband is man enough not to feel threatened by this situation, and understanding enough to go along with it, how dare the state interfere to prevent it?

There are too many people who do not understand how important it is for some women to have the same surname not as their husband but as their children. That is why so many women who still have young children retain their husband’s surname even after they separate from him and can no longer stand the sight or sound of him. They don’t look at it as their husband’s surname, but as their children’s surname.

Marthese Said was forced by the law to choose between Spiteri and Scerri. She chose Scerri, but under protest for years refused to change her ID card, even though it had expired, because it showed the name she wanted: Marthese Said.

I understand her sentiments completely. Men, who never have to change their identity, cannot even begin to understand what it is like for a woman to be buffeted about from one surname (and one identity) to another. It is as though the woman is being told: your identity is fluid, because you are a woman.

And that is why, when she applied for the Bahrija permit one year after she married Victor Scerri, her ID card – and therefore the details on her permit application – showed the name Marthese Said, her first husband’s surname and not her ‘maiden name’.

In 2004, thanks to the heroic efforts of my former classmate Odette (those nuns might not have been generally up to much, but they certainly produced a shed-load of determined ball-breakers, if you will excuse the expression), the law was changed and Marthese was allowed to choose between reverting to her first husband’s surname from her second husband’s surname or using both surnames together.

She chose the latter option, and became Marthese Scerri Said, and that is why the current electoral roll lists her under that name.

I can’t think of many men who would be big enough not to make a zillion scenes about their wife’s decision to use another man’s surname, when that man was not her father, or to tack it onto his own. It says a lot about Victor Scerri that there were no such scenes or ultimatums, and all of it is positive.

As for many of the rest of us, we really need to move into the 21st century.