Campaign duo whose daughter’s surname is a merger of their own
CIVIL partnership campaigners Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan follow a very 21st-century approach to family life.
As well as refusing to countenance marriage, the couple – both academics – chose a ‘genderneutral’ name for their 20-month-old daughter, Eden, and gave her the surname Keidstein, a fusion of their surnames. This is to avoid what they see as the outdated practice of wives adopting their husbands’ names.
They have been together for seven years after meeting at a lecture on Gaza, making the decision to commit to one another during a holiday in the Pyrenees.
Miss Steinfeld, 35, and Mr Keidan, 40 – who she jokingly refers to as her ‘partner in life and crime’ – live together in Hammersmith, West London, with their daughter.
But right from the start, their views on soci- ety convinced them that the institution of marriage was not for them, preferring what Miss Steinfeld calls the ‘relatively neutral and a blank slate’ of civil partnerships – even though these were set up specifically for gay couples who were then unable to marry.
Both are prolific Twitter users and bloggers who have enjoyed flourishing careers in academia. Miss Steinfeld is a political scientist specialising in gender and race issues and is a visiting research fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London.
She studied for a PhD at Oxford University and subsequently taught undergraduate courses about the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The committed feminist specialises in the ‘politics of reproduction’ in Europe and says one of her key research interests is ‘feminists resisting attempts to turn women’s wombs into national vessels’.
Articles she has had published have titles such as ‘Wars of the Wombs: Struggles Over Abortion Policies in Israel’ and ‘Male circumcision is a feminist issue too’.
Described as a ‘deep thinker about philanthropy’, Mr Keidan is the editor of Alliance, a magazine aimed at philanthropists.
After attending sixth form college in North London he studied at Cambridge University.
He then spent almost a decade as director of the Pears Foundation, set up by philanthropist Trevor Pears, one of the heirs to a multibillion-pound property firm. Mr Keidan has also taught ethics and philanthropy at Stanford University and Cass Business School.