Debbie Duncan

(June 23, 1998)

The news from the American Association of University Women that single-sex education is no better for girls than coeducation caused quite a stir among parents this spring. Since 1992 we had been relying on an earlier AAUW report that said girls were shortchanged by coed schools, especially in math and science. We also knew of Mary Pipher’s “Reviving Ophelia” and Peggy Ornstein’s “School Girls,” best sellers about the loss of self-esteem many girls face in adolescence. All of this evidence had caused even life-long public school advocates, including me, to consider girls’ schools for our daughters.

I remember well the pain and conflicts of adolescence. In seventh grade I told my mother, “The boys wouldn’t like me if I ran for student body president.” That didn’t keep me from doing well academically, though Chemistry was a struggle. I wasn’t discouraged from technology — my father even thought I’d make a terrific mathematician. I just preferred arts to sciences.

So it came as no shock when my first daughter, now in seventh grade herself, was especially verbal. She talked earlier than most boys, and when she learned to read, that was a snap, too. Her father and I helped her with her “math facts” (as they are called) in elementary school, but she would rather have been reading or on the stage. When the time came to consider applying to an all-girl school for sixth grade, she would have nothing of it. I told her I expected her to show the same assertiveness to her teachers and the boys in her classes. Indeed she has.

Her two younger sisters have a knack for math. Still, my current fifth grader did not want to apply to a traditional girls’ school or to the new, technology-oriented middle school for girls. I didn’t push, but part of me still worried, are we doing what’s best for her?

I think so. Parents should be aware of educational research, but they shouldn’t let so-called expert opinion — fluid as it is — outweigh parental instinct about individual children. We should also consider the societal implications of abandoning public schools, where most girls — and boys — are educated. Better, insist on gender-fair instruction and equal access in all subjects: math, science, and even English and drama.

With a Perspective, I’m Debbie Duncan.

(December 24, 1997)

It’s the end of Christmas card season, and my annual frustration about the way many of the envelopes are addressed to our household. (For the record, my name is Deborah A. Duncan. Debbie Duncan, for short. I am married to William E., or Bill Stone.) Cards come to:

Mr. and Mrs. William E. Stone
The Stone family
The Stones
or, the one that really gets to me: The William Stones. Sorry, but only one William Stone resides here. (Bill’s uncle and namesake is six feet under in Peoria.)

I am not a Stone any more than Bill is a Duncan. I like the name Debbie Duncan, and chose to keep it — legally, professionally, socially, totally when Bill and I married sixteen years ago. “But what about the kids?” (We have three.) They have their father’s last name with mine in the middle. They go by all three names, except that the school district’s computer is unable to handle a complete middle name. I complain that if Martin Luther King were registered in Palo Alto, he would show up as Martin L. King, and his teachers would call him Martin King. Our oldest has decided to hyphenate.

More than two decades after Ms. came into the lexicon, confusion reigns, even though lots of moms have different last names than their children — nine out of twenty in my second-grader’s class, for example. Yet some people still fail to recognize us. Or they get the last name right, but use “Mrs.” My mother is Mrs. Duncan! I hold out hope that by the time my daughters are adults, it will finally be fully acceptable to be Ms. Yourself instead of Mrs. Somebody Else.

Before next holiday season, please consider the Debbie Duncan guide for addressing families with different surnames:

Ms. Deborah A. Duncan
Mr. William E. Stone (formal)
Debbie Duncan and Bill Stone (informal)
The Duncan & Stone family (not much harder to write than The Stones)

Don’t write off those women who have chosen not to change their names. Continue to write to us, but please address us properly.

With a Perspective, I’m Debbie Duncan.