Say Her Name.

Naming a baby is a monumental decision parents make. Loved ones and bystanders are curious to know a newborn’s selected name. 

I’m certainly eager to learn the name of my new grandchild when they are born in June, and the name of my friend and colleague Lili’s child due in May! 

Culturally, a name may be a declaration, a description, a link to the past, or a hope for the future. Even if someone changes their name, the impact of that first given name is significant.

Whatever the intent or impact, our given name matters to us and is linked to our identity.

A study by Dennis P. Carmody and Michael Lewis (Brain Res, 2006) using PET scans demonstrated that the brain is uniquely activated when hearing one’s given name spoken. 

This is true even when subjects were in a Persistent Vegetative State (PSV) demonstrating no awareness of themselves or their environment. And yet, hearing their names briefly activated the self-recognition area of the brain. 

If hearing your name is powerful and identity-activating, what is the impact of not speaking your name?

In the recent past in the US, after marriage, women’s names were exchanged for their husbands’ names in public. This seems strange now but was common for my parents and grandparents. For example, my grandmother, Miss Geraldine Walsh, became Mrs. William P. Smith. 

Given that identity is activated by the sound of one’s name, what did it mean psychologically for women to no longer hear their names in public, particularly in the context of women’s stories, contributions, and voices being ignored as unworthy, uninteresting, or unimportant? 

And yet, they persisted.

Still, women pressed on despite being marginalized, contributing to the sciences, math, art, business, literature, medicine, education, and many other fields even while often going unrecognized or even being misattributed. 

And, many other women, who never had the opportunity for education and professional contributions, labored instead, often unpaid, supporting the contributions of others. This work too mattered and enabled progress, breakthroughs, improvements, and inventions. Such contributions are famously ignored while those they supported are held up as heroes. 

Society’s power structures try to tell us what is important and who is important. The dominant culture tells us whose stories should be told, whose names should be said and whose should not.

But we can choose to say the names of those that society ignores.

We can speak the names of our mothers, grandmothers, and female ancestors whose names and stories were passed over. These generations of women enabled contemporary progress and the next generations of women to create, discover, and lead if they choose or to enable and support if they choose, all worthy contributions.

The Grandmother’s Song

My younger daughter, Faith Imboden Black, is an accomplished renaissance woman.

A musician, seamstress, carpenter, woodworker, leatherworker, and midwife, she is also an accomplished cook, preservationist, herbalist, and baker, the latter inspired by her great-grandmother Geraldine. 

Faith has a ritual when she bakes. She sings the Grandmother’s Song, a piece of her own composition, with lyrics comprised of the names of her female ancestors, both those living and those who have long returned to the earth many generations ago. These names encompass women from Ireland and Europe to the indigenous Comanche Tribe of America. 

You can hear her sing the song in the video. Here, she uses this song as a blessing over an apple pie, a recipe given to her by her great-grandmother when Faith was a little girl. 

In her work as a midwife, Faith says, “Our Grandmothers live on in all of us, their names are sacred. To say them aloud allows us to bear retrospective witness to their lives and remember the love and bravery they have sent forward through time to create us, and in that way, it is our obligation as women to live into every facet of our lives.”

After you listen to Faith sing the Grandmother’s Song, I invite you to pause and name the women in your lineage, mothers, aunties, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers who enabled your family through their labors of all sorts. 

Say their names out loud. 

Recall their stories; appreciate what was told and perhaps not told of their lives. 

Acknowledge their courage, strength, endurance, creativity, contributions, and love.

For me, these women are Deborah, Jane, Susy, Zella, Geraldine, Dorothy, Lydia, Mabel, and Mary. 

And looking back is incomplete if we don’t look ahead to the future too, and say the names of our daughters, daughters-in-law, granddaughters, and nieces. 

Let their names commit us to co-creating a more loving way of working and a world where everyone belongs and is welcome to contribute. 

Faith, Gracia, Christie, Desirée, Breana, Skylar, Capri, Miranda. 

Say Her Name.