J. N. Hook - All Those Wonderful Names

Emily, Rachel, Bernadette,

Ellen, Astrid, Fawn,

Cecilia, Tamar, Christabel,

Lolita, Inez, Dawn.

Marguerite, Rita, Angeline,

Keiko, Moira, Mae,

Corinne, Denise, May-Ree-Lynn,

Mahalia, Pauline, Faye.

Heidi, Haidee, Isabel,

Kathryn, Lucette, or Joy

(In Heaven yclept Euphrosyne).

Thank God youre not a boy.

You hold your newborn daughter in your arms for the first time. Perhaps her father stands beside your hospital bed. You brush your lips across the babys forehead and gaze adoringly, wonderingly, at her.

You say, I wonder what shell be like, what shell become.

Will she be a great actress, dancer, teacher, politician, business person, industrial tycoon? Maybe shell get into Whos Who.

Maybe, your husband agrees. A person doesnt have to be in Whos Who to be great, though. Im not in it, and youre not, but youre great anyhow.

I wonder if a girls name helps to get her in or keep her out?

Probably not. It might be fun to browse in Whos Who in the library and see whether any first names keep popping up over and over. Does an unusual name help, or are Whos Who names like everybody elses?

If you ever did look in Whos Who in the United States, Whos Who in Canada, or the British Whos Who, representative samplings of the names would look something like the following three lists. For each list, pages in a Whos Who were selected randomly, and womens names were recorded to a total of 250. (Mens names exceed womens by about 11 or 12 to 1, but that one-sided ratio is declining.)

Percentage

Women listed in a 1989 or 1990 Whos Who were born, on average, in the 1930s. At that time, almost all the names on the previous list were also among the 50 most popular in the United States, with Mary, Barbara, Linda, Ruth, and Patricia ranking especially high.

But women with less popular birth names of that period certainly have not been shut out. Jane (plain Jane, some people called her) has three entries, as the list shows, but relatively few girls were given that name in the 1930s (Dunkling, First Names First). Similar comments apply to many other names with only one or two appearances in the Whos Who sampling, for example, Cynthia, Daisy, Gilda, Leona, Manuela, Rebecca, Regina, Rosemarie, Sherry, Sandy, Violet. And women with still more uncommon names also got into Whos Who: Exina, Jhane (shes no plain Jane), Luginia, Mara, Maya, Otti, Selena, Vali. So unique Vali finds herself in the Peerage of Great Accomplishment alongside the much more numerous Barbaras and Elizabeths. Its not the name that brings the fame; its what the girl becomes and the woman does.

Similar conclusions may be drawn from the names of Canadian and British women included in the pantheons of the famous.

Percentage

In Canada, too, the most common names in the Whos Who list are not far different from those most popular in the country at large. But once more, much less popular names can be found in the bright red book: Adina, Alexia, Christilot, Inger, Iby, Milada....

Percentage

Some grand old names there: The first four belonged to various queens and princesses. In the 1930s, those names also ranked high among non-Whos Who Britishers. So did Barbara, Joan, and some of the others.