Victory! Mums are on marriage certificates
This week, after five years, Ailsa Burkimsher Sadler and the Telegraph have won a campaign to change the law
Like many people, I hadn’t looked at my marriage certificate since I wed my husband David in 2001. Back then I was 25 and unsurprisingly, more focused on the ceremony than the legal paperwork. It was 12 years later that I got the certificate out again. I needed it to change my name; when I married, I’d given up my maiden name Burkimsher to take his surname of Sadler. But after giving birth to our son, Elliot, I wanted to include both our surnames.
When I looked at the certificate, I was shocked. While it listed the details of my father and father-in-law, and their professions, there was no equivalent space for our mothers. Both women were completely absent.
I realised how sexist that was – and I couldn’t believe that it was the first I’d heard of it. At the time, conversations around gender equality were growing louder and the Bank of England had just agreed to put Jane Austen on the new £10 note, following a feminist campaign. But no one was talking about the fact that marriage certificates in England and Wales hadn’t changed since 1837, and were effectively writing women out of history.
It dated back to a time when women were seen as property; to be transferred from father to husband. That didn’t feel acceptable to me in the 21st century. When I told my own mother, Heather, about it, she was just as shocked. And I couldn’t shift the thought that, should Elliot ever marry, I too would be excluded.
That just wasn’t an option for me. So I launched a petition on Change.org: “Mothers’ names should be on marriage certificates.” To date, it has had 70,422 signatures, and this week – five years after I first launched the campaign
– I got my victory.
A Bill proposed by MP Tim Loughton has now been passed, meaning the Government will officially update marriage certificates to include space for mothers’ names. Hearing the news was thrilling and surreal. With Brexit dominating, I had almost given up hope of anything happening by the end of this current Parliament. But last
Friday evening, I logged into my email at the end of a busy
week, and saw the news. It was hard to take in after so many years of unfinished business.
Even though I set up the campaign in 2013, it only took off in 2014 when The Telegraph covered the story. Suddenly the signatures hit the tens of thousands. I received huge amounts of support, particularly from people who had been raised by their mothers and had absent fathers. Many of them had got around the existing document by asking their mothers to be witnesses at their marriage – but it wasn’t the same.
Campaigning became full-time work and I had to juggle it with my job as a chartered accountant – but it was worth it when, in August that year, David Cameron pledged to address this historic inequality. I was thrilled, and it was reported as a victory – but there wasn’t any concrete agreement or outline of what would happen next.
Over the years, various MPS launched Private Member’s Bills, but with the changes in governments and general elections, they ran out of steam. The Home Office provided support for how the change would look behind the scenes, but the whole thing took so long. It was frustrating; I couldn’t see why it was taking so long. All I was asking for was the option to record the mother’s information; to me it was just a case of adding another box to a certificate.
My own family were a huge source of support and my mother-in-law has been just as encouraging – though I think it’s fair to say that neither my father nor father-in-law felt as passionately. My husband, David, is proud of me for making an impact on British law and even Elliot, now 11, asked to sign the petition.
The act of campaigning has been a journey for me. It’s the first time I’ve done anything like this and I hadn’t really been aware of “everyday sexism” before becoming a mother. But I now realise how much of the caring work done by women still isn’t recognised – and marriage certificates were a part of that problem.
Not everyone will think this is an important issue. But around 250,000 people marry each year in Britain and it’s only fair for them to have the option to include their mothers’ names on their certificates. Why should that right automatically go to the father, based on an archaic precedent?
Announcing the news, Mr Loughton called it “a really good piece of legislation after a pretty crummy week” – and I couldn’t agree more.