Cushman Writes

Dedicated to my cousin who got married this summer! In April 2025, YouGov released data on how a sample of the British public believes married couples should choose their married name. Like many other Western countries, Britain has traditionally followed a naming pattern in which, in a heterosexual relationship, the wife adopts her husband’s surname as her own. However, there has been a slow growth in naming choices away from surnames in the patriarchal tradition. In this post, I outline these changing attitudes and posit why changing your name is unnecessary.     The YouGov Data As part of the survey, participants were asked whether they viewed each option as positive, negative, don’t know or neither positive nor negative. They were provided with the following options: a woman taking their spouse’s surname, a couple both keeping their original surnames, a couple combining their names into a double-barrelled one, a man taking their spouse’s surname, a couple taking eac...

After a vacation to the archive, I am back with some thoughts on death and its governance. Why is it governed? What does this governance look like? All thoughts I have late in the evening after a day at the archive... Since I started thinking about what I wanted my thesis to be on, I have spent a considerable amount of time surrounded by death. I have visited the crematorium, studied documents,  spent long hours in the archives , and had my own personal experiences of death that have furthered my questioning. Yet, I am struck continually by the structure of death—its rules, regulations,  and requirements.  Death is the most natural thing. We are all born and we all die. Life is, to an extent, free from strict rules of who can do what and when and where and why, and yet death appears to be the very opposite.  Death itself is not governable — most people cannot choose when, where, or how they will die. Yet everything around death is subject to rules. So, for the sake o...

Ramsey St Mary’s lies three miles from Ramsey, on the threshold of the Cambridgeshire Fens — a flat, formerly marshy terrain that poses challenges for both the living and the dead. This post argues that the Fenland’s environmental fragility challenges Christian ideals of perpetual rest, revealing tensions between faith, memory and environmental challenge. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” these are the words uttered at the committal of the deceased’s body into the ground during a Church of England service. [1] Placing the body back to the earth, to return to it, seems to be at the essence of burial. An act of reconnecting man with nature, specifically with the earth created by G-d. Yet, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, communities worked fervently to claim these spaces as their own — not just in life, but in perpetuity. Christian doctrine taught that humanity would be judged at the Second Coming of Christ. All who have ever lived will be raised from the dead, ...