PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC — Lucie Kundra is something of a feminist rebel -- not because she wouldn't take her husband's name when they got married last year, but because she did.
She adopted his surname exactly as it was, and in doing so defied centuries of tradition and the wishes of her own mother. That's because she refused to add the customary feminine suffix "ova" at the end, as the Czech language normally dictates; she answers to Lucie Kundra, not Lucie Kundrova.
The three letters were a step too far for the 27-year-old charity worker.
"I really didn't want 'ova' because [it means] you are owned by your husband," Kundra says. "Language is a huge part of culture and socialization, and if we want to change relations between women and men and promote equal opportunities, this is something we have to deal with."
Though still a small minority, more and more young Czech women are grappling with that question as women make further inroads in Czech society and inch closer to parity with men.
But it's a tough row to hoe when the entire structure of the Czech language is stacked against you, when deviating from the linguistic norm can not only raise eyebrows but even get you fired. Self-expression still has its limits here in a country that was under the thumb of Soviet totalitarianism until 20 years ago.
Linguistically speaking, the vast majority of Czech women spend their entire lives belonging to one man or another.
They're born with their dads' surnames, plus "ova" at the end; tennis champion Martina Navratilova, for example, is the stepdaughter of Miroslav Navratil. Then, after marriage, when a woman takes her spouse's last name, with the usual addition, she switches "allegiance" from father to husband.
But the sexism of the language only starts there. Czech is a complex, towering edifice built on declensions, changes made to a noun depending on which "case" it is, whether subject, object and so forth. It's like conjugating a verb correctly to match the subject. When speaking about a woman, all the declensions of her name are based on her having a feminine version of it to begin with.
So when the "ova" is missing, it becomes difficult to speak about her naturally.
"It violates the main principle of the Czech language," says Sarka Blazkova (husband's name: Blazek), who works at the state-funded Institute for the Czech Language.
