Yes, Prime Minister
Canada's new prime minister, Stephen Harper, could never be called the life of the party. He's stiff, formal and private. But he's married to a woman who, in personality, is his polar opposite. She's easy-going, vivacious, independent, rides around town on a motorcycle and had a career as a graphic designer before the birth of her two children.
Her name is Laureen Teskey. Or it was until a week after her husband won the federal election in January, and his Conservative Party took power. Then, she announced that she wished to be known as Mrs Harper.
You could see that statement as a personal matter, but the timing of it says otherwise. It is actually a highly symbolic political gesture. For a woman of her generation - she's in her mid 40s - to suddenly adopt her husband's surname after having decided, when they were married, to keep her own name is anything but whimsical. And she has been taken to task for it by women across the country.
It was the feminist movement in the 1970s that first began encouraging Canadian women to keep their maiden names at marriage. It was part of a larger social effort to encourage women to seek pay equality with men, to oblige society to recognise discrimination against women in the workplace and conjugal violence in the home.
Women in their twenties no longer see the issue in such black and white terms. They aren't discriminated against in the way that many of their mothers were. So they feel free to choose what name to use after marriage.
But Mrs Harper is another matter. Mr Harper's political power base is the right: white, rural, evangelical Christians. But, to win the election, he needed to convince secular, non-white, big-city residents that he is a moderate who believed in gender equality.
Now that he's in power, he needs to do the reverse: convince his base that he's still a God-fearing conservative who believes abortion and gay marriage are wrong. Having a motorcycle-riding wife with a different name is just the sort of thing that might make many of his early supporters doubt his conservative credentials. So Laureen Teskey became Mrs Harper.
The irony of it is that the first wife of a prime minister to keep her own name was Maureen McTeer, who was married to former prime minister Joe Clark. He was a Conservative, like Mr Harper, but his base was not the religious right. During Mr Clark's seven-month term as prime minister in 1979, Ms McTeer was often criticised for keeping her own name because, many conservatives said, it showed she was not deferential enough to men.
Two years ago, Ms McTeer wrote the story of her life. The title: In My Own Name.
