Right near the end of a long recent afternoon in a drab cubicle in a local branch of one the largest banking systems in the world, I entered another dimension. My spouse and I had been endlessly signing forms and proffering photo identifications to open a new account we'd needed. The woman on the other side of the desk had been briskly typing phone numbers and addresses. Then she said she just needed to ask a few security questions. What was the name of the street I grew up on? What was my mother's maiden name? I suddenly got the uneasy feeling I'd been transported into a retro-tinged Florence Pugh movie. Who grows up on one street any more? Whose mother was a maiden? Had I — a woman who shared children with the man sitting next to her but did not share his name — ever been one?
"Maiden" exists right up there with the somehow still-popular "co-ed" and "love child" in the pantheon of phrases nobody should be using any more. It's the 21st century and lots of women go to college; unmarried people have babies, and not everyone has a straight, cisgender mother who absorbed a husband's nomenclature when her father handed her off to him along with her bride price.
