[I had posted this earlier, but there was a glitch that kept the comments from working; reposting it now.]
I've found that lots of women of my circle — generally professionals who, I think, would describe themselves feminists at least in the sense of believe that men and women should be fundamentally equal socially and professionally — change their last names when they marry.
That surprises me, because the symbolism strikes me as somewhat antifeminist; maybe it shouldn't, but it does. Perhaps this is because back in Russia, where I first noticed people's last names, my mother and my grandmother (who had helped raise me) had kept their maiden names, and I think so had many of my parents' friends. I distinctly remember my reaction when I met a couple my parents knew, and noticed that they had the same last name: They're not just husband and wife, I thought; they must be brother and sister. I hadn't learned yet about the incest taboo, and brother-sister marriages seemed more plausible to me than a person's changing her name.
But of course different people perceive symbols differently; and obviously many friends of mine don't take the view that I do. So let me ask a question, and seek comments, but only from women who have changed their names when they married: Why?
I think I know some possible answers, but I don't want to influence the responses, so I'll just seek comments from the readers. Again, please post comments only if you are a woman, and you changed your name when you married.
UPDATE: Tyler Cowen comments.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Many Thanks
- More on Women and Last Names:
- Women and Last Names:
I'm changing my name because I want my children to have the same last name as both their parents. My fiance and I considered using my last name or a common historical last name, but we decided that would be too complicated. Sometimes I worry about the decision, thinking I will lose my connection to my family, but I realize that as long as I keep in touch with my family, that keeps the connection strong.
It was not an easy decision, and I wouldn't judge harshly anyone who did otherwise than I.
The old standard practice in the US was to take your maiden name as your new middle name. My mom, for example, was Linda Joan Hasse before marriage, and Linda Hasse Dulak after, though she just uses the H. as middle initial. I was Michelle Kathleen [usually just K.] Dulak before marriage, Michelle Dulak Thomson after, and I do try to use all three names so the "Dulak" stays visible. (I dislike the hyphenation craze; I was not keen to be Michelle Dulak-Thomson. I know one couple so egalitarian that both spouses took the hyphenated name. Lord only knows what will happen if children of two such marriages marry! A name can stand only so many hyphens.)
If possible, and you get appropriate data, it would be
interesting if you did a really, really silly sounding statistical test. Is there a correlation between changing your last name and moving up in the alphabet? I know this sounds idiotic, but at my former work place, we were discussing this with people in our section and *every single* woman in our section who changed their name moved
forward in the alphabet. (Example: I went from "Txxxx" to
"Lxxx".) None who would move back changed their name when they married. (Example: Ms. "Bxxx" did not change to Mrs. "Nxxx" when she married.)
Since we were polling the engineers, all with MS degrees or
higher, we had a small sample of about 9, and of course, an odd sub-group.
For the record, not one woman *thought* the move up or down in the alphabet had anything to do with their decision to change last names.
Additionally, I'd always hated that the initials of my maiden name spelled HAM, and I'd never felt any attachment to my middle name, so I was happy to trade HAM for HMV.
Besides, who wouldn't want to become a Volokh? (Spelling issues aside.)
We should not fetishize names. They're arbitary. I always feel very sorry for people with "bad" names, e.g. names not merely unpronouceable, but embarrassing. Many names falling into this category are those from a non-Anglophile culture that unfortunately are synonyms with obscenities or goofy phrases in English: E.g., Thomas Crapp, Mary Slutsy, Young Bum Koo, etc. There is no virtue in going through life as Jon Turd or Jane Lipshits. Courts should offer free name changes to all!
With all that said, let me hastily add, that I agree these concepts apply to both genders and I have no intellectual problem with men taking their wives' names (I had a family member who did that) or of the couple choosing a new name.
I never considered it a feminist issue. The name just wasn't all that central to my identity. I thought about it, but ever since I was about twelve, I couldn't wait to never have to hear another bad Catholic joke.
If you're doing it for the right reasons (because you want to, and not because you feel like you have to), changing your name at marriage isn't any less feminist than getting married in the first place. And I have little patience for those who claim that marriage is an inherently anti-feminist act. It can be, but it shouldn't be.
An interesting sidenote: in the last few years, I have started using my middle name more. However, since Oris (which was my paternal grandmother's first name) is not a common name, many people assume it is my maiden name, and I have gotten quite a few letters addressed to "Ms. Oris Davidson."
If I were a young woman getting married in today's world, I'd use my last name for business and add my husband's last name for official documents and family matters. It's a simple way of having it both ways.
If you're keeping tabs, you can add me to the anti-hyphenated list
Nobody asks me to repeat or spell my married name. Having the same name as my children was also important. We married five years before I got my professional license, so that was not an issue either.
I have less qualms now about the philosophy behind my decision than the logistics.
Changing my name proved a long, still- ongoing trip through bureaucracies large and small, private and public, aggravating and more aggravating. I work at a large Fortune 500 company, and changing my name, which acts as my login on many of the atabases I must use daily, required at least 3-4 and phone calls/emails or letters. Dealing with the government wasn't so bad, though I'm not 100% everything there came out ok. But I still have several accounts out there in the world that know me by another name.
If I had to do it over again, I might have kept my old name.
The other day while signing a charge slip, the store owner asked me, "Is that a sign or a sentence?"
1. Everyone gets two last names.
2. Daughters are named with their father's last name (FLN) first, and mother's last name (MLN) second.
3. Sons are named with MLN first, FLN second.
4. When couples get married, the husband takes the wife's MLN, and the wife takes the husbands FLN.
5. Kids then get their father's father's last name and their mother's mother's last name, with order determined by steps 2 and 3 above.
It would work I tell you.
I will move from a very pronounceable and common last name to a very ethnically-identified last name (my fiance and I are of different races, and his last name makes his racial identity crystal clear). I will be interested to observe people's reactions when they speak to me on the phone or email me, then meet me and realize I am not of the ethnicity they assumed. Should be an interesting sociological experiment.
Conveniently, my girlfriend would like to keep her name and has one which is quite intuitive yet not all that common.
Another consideration is the fact that I do have a brother, so the name would not die out with me. Again, if I had a good reason to keep the name, I would. But I only see it as an inconvenience, while my husband's last name is five letters long and is about evenly divided between consonants and vowels.
The husband appreciated it, his last name is much easier for a random person-on-the-street to spell and pronounce, and I had no objections to it.
And you feminists crack me up - isn't the point of feminism to support women in their choices? So where's the support of women who want to change their names?
My married name is much easier for me. With Thompson, they just ask, "en or on?" and away we go. In addition, I preferred sharing the same name as my husband, and as a traditional sort of person, it just seemed right to me.
Miss Manners (well-known ettiquette expert) says that having your maiden name as your middle name, followed by your husband's name, actually indicates that you are divorced. It was done to distinguish the former Mrs. Smith (who is now known as Mrs. Maiden Smith) from the current Mrs. Smith.
My husband and I talked about it for a long time beforehand. The rule was that I would change my name as long as I had not been published professionally before then, as I wanted all my professional work to be under one name. I had a female teacher who hyphenated her name and it was a devil of a time to track down her research as various journals did it one of three ways: (1) Her maiden name [prior to marriage] (2) Her hyphenated name or (3) her Married name as they didn't allow hyphens.
We wanted the same name in our family so that when attending functions for our future children, teachers could easily identify us. We also didn't want to have to choose which family name to use for the children, and wanted them to have the same name. As, I'm the oldest of 4 children, two of which are boys. My husband is the oldest of 3, and he's the only male. So, he wanted to continue his family name for geneology's sake, which meant the children would have his name.
So while I loved my maiden name and considered keeping it, I chose to change it and my first paper was published under my married name even though I did the work 1 year previous to the marriage.
It's interesting that so many of the decisions about name changes were made for purely pragmatic reasons of spelling and pronunciation. Women are doing whatever works best for us.
I guess we really have come a long way.
I also had quirky and personal reasons. I am half Italian, and I got an Italian surname when I married. My maiden name is Scottish, so if I take up the bagpipes I can wear a kilt from my clan tartan. (Perhaps related... In the mid-1700's the last Marquess died childless. His sister's husband took her name, and their son regained the title.)
cathy :-)
1. it was important to my husband that everyone in our family have the same last name. (i changed my cat's last name, too)
2. i really liked his name and it was his name that drew me to him in the first place.
3. i always found women who kept their maiden name to be annoying mostly because it's a pain in the ass when addressing envelopes.
I was referring to the original post, not the comments (which I hadn't read when I left mine).
When my wife and I married, back in the 70s, I was about to embark on a career that would take us overseas constantly. For the sake of avoiding hassles, we considered that a single family name on both passports would be eminently useful in avoiding numerous Immigration wrangles.
She kept her maiden name for all her writings and all her personal financial matters. We shared the same surname for documentation purposes, present and future.
Did the maiden-as-middle name thing, too. Partly because of the novelty of having a middle name (I hadn't had one before). I think Judith Martin's got it wrong; the effect sounds to me late-19thc-early-20thc bourgeois, not divorcee.
If I had it to do over, though, I'd have stuck with my old name. Hasn't been worth the trouble. Don't imagine at this point it'd be worth the trouble to change back, either.
I do like his name better in some ways than my maiden name, and no one in my original family kept my maiden name except me: my father changed his last name, my mother remarried and took my stepfather's last name, and my sister changed her name to his too, and got adopted by my stepfather. So I was the only one with my maiden name from age 13 or so until I married at 26.
It was absolutely no professional trouble to change my name, though I made a half hearted attempt to use my maiden name for some things for a while, it didn't work out. I did keep both my middle name and maiden name as middle names though and now have a 4 part name (first, original middle, maiden surname, husband's surname).
And I moved from position 7 in the alphabet to position 1, and from 9 letters to 7.
My maiden name was hardly ever misspelled, because people asked. My married name is frequently misspelled because people drop the "t" (And the names mean the same thing Ian/John - sley/ston as "small farm")
Eugene, this is not about feminism. Don't get hung up on symbols. Allowing a man to hold a door open from time to time isn't a feminist bugbear anymore. Focus on the real stuff: women still earn less, are expected to do more child care, hit glass ceilings, are subject to more of a sexual double standard, and still face a ton of other overt and covert discrimination.
I should also confess that I've known many e-mail administrators etc. who flagrantly ignore requests from women to maintain hyphenated names. The hyphens sometimes blow up the mail server so they just set them up with the last part of the hyphenated name. I find this disrespectful, but it is another argument against hyphenation.
Think of it this way. I think there are far more important things to feminism than whether you change your name on marriage. Economic equity. Political office parity. End to sexual discrimination. Money! Power! And how far back do you go to find a "matriarchal" name to keep? It's all a man's name for the most part, unless you come froma very different world than I do.
At the time I changed my name, I made the same comments as many women here--it was my dad's name, it wasn't that big a deal, I was still a feminist, his name was WAY easier to pronounce and spell than my maiden name, and so on. But bluntly, and looking back at it, I (and I suspect most women who change their names) was not being honest. The real, core reason was that it was very, very important to my husband that we have the same last name. And if I had refused, it would have been an enormous battle. It was easier to give up a name I wasn't terribly attached to, anyway, and my husband liked it. I didn't want to admit that if I stood my ground rather than saying "no, your sense of male privilege is not a trump card," that it would have caused an irreparable rift and perhaps ended our marriage. (Eventually it ended anyway.)
After the divorce I changed my last name to a family name (not my father's--long story there), and kept it when I remarried. My daughters have my last name and my son has his father's. It's never been a source of 'confusion' to the children or, for that matter, to anyone else. In an era of blended families nobody seems to think much of a constellation of last names.
In the end, I took my husband's last name because I like it better than my maiden name. My father is a real douchebag, so leaving his last name behind really didn't fill me with sorrow. Plus, my new last name is infinitely easier to spell and pronounce than my maiden name.
I think Virginia Postrel had an interesting take on this a while back. "True liberation makes the personal apolitical."
I haven't taken my current husband's last name because I'm too well known in my professional circle by my first name and maiden name. Changing my name to include his last name would just make things confusing for me.
My husband actually offered to change his name to mine if I wanted! We also considered a merger of our two names (we both hated hyphenating) but there was no graceful way to do so. I just had no particular attachment to my maiden name. It wasn't any kind of statement about anti-feminism.
As another commenter has noted, the whole surnaming system in the West has a patriarchal turn so I don't see what's so bloody feminist about keeping one's father's surname as an adult woman
The fact is that this practice is based in the now defunct common law doctrine of coverture and its denial of numerous legal rights to women.
It amazes me how soon we forget history. Coverture was upheld in the Supreme Court case of Bradwell v. Illinois in 1893, only a few generations ago, yet many are willing to call the women's rights movement complete (or at least largely complete, with only systemic or "leftover" problems). An exorcism of demons as nefarious as those which, for millennia, held women at a lower biological and legal standard than men takes far longer than that.
Today, as previous posts show, the male last name is assumed as a matter of convenience; that is, the convenience of abiding by tradition. That tradition, however, is a remnant of a regrettable and shameful history of repression. Being conscious of this, I don't see how one could be persuaded to continue in it, regardless of the benefits.
If it is important to you, then fine. But I could care less what it used to mean (or what some people think it used to mean) long ago. I think it is currently a fine tradition that brings our family even closer. And all I'm really doing is exchanging one man's name for another ;-)
The same patriarchal tradition that accounts for women changing their names also accounts for why children get their father's name. Both are functions of how Westerners have organized their society. If these traditions have been made, they can be unmade if people applied themselves.
Seth,
Why do we use the English system of measurement? Sure, if the majority of us wanted to throw out tradition and start anew we probably could. But the majority never will. Americans are tolerant enough of those with different ideas to allow them to implement them for themselves, but those who oppose tradition should be tolerant of us who are very happy with the current situation.
I have yet to see one good reason to spend time and effort to change the current tradition. I will certainly encourage my daughter to take her husband's name when she marries.
My husband had no strong feelings about me changing my name. He said that it was completely up to me, and whatever I wanted to do was fine. I chose to change it partly because I liked the idea of having the same name as my children (my parents divorced when I was 1, and my mother kept her married name so she and I would have the same name). I also did it as an expression of confidence that we would be together for life. I can see the reasons for not changing to a husband's name, and don't criticize any woman who keeps her name, but I'm happy with my choice.
A couple of years after I changed my name, I realized that all of my married cousins (mostly Midwestern) had changed their names, but almost none of my college friends (East and West Coast) had.
(I wanted us to have the same last name because it marked us as a family.)
My children's names are hyphenated. A commenter earlier noted that this would make things tricky if two such hyphenated adults want to marry. I think that when my children are adults, they can make their own decisions about their names. They can drop the hyphen, choose one surname over another, take their spouses' names, choose another surname - whatever they like. I made the choice that was right for me, and I hope they do the same.
And I haven't noticed that they feel a lack of family unity. To the contrary, they relish having each of our names - it creates a very pleasing symmetry and unity in our family.
Thanks for the topic, good postings.
My husband and I struggled with this issue before getting married. He really would have like us to share the same last name (for all the symbolic and practical reasons outlined above) -- so I offered to "give" him mine. In the end we chose to keep our own names... and I guess that's the point I want to make -- Sure, my last name is the one descended from my father. But for my entire life it has also been MY name. We haven't decided exactly how to address the naming of our children when that day comes (although we very much like Former Kerr Student's suggestion!)... but if I were to give my daughter my last name would it still be "just another man's name"? I choose to believe that it's mine -- it's the name attached to all my degrees and publications, the name that's shorthand for my identity to every person I've ever met.
My commitment to my husband and the family unit we've formed is extremely strong -- certainly no one would ever question my husband's commitment because he declined to accept the last name I offered. After a lot of initial soul-searching about this, we're extremely comfortable with our choice... it's hard to believe it ever seemed like such a big deal. Any practical inconveniences have been very small. Yeah, we get a few letters addressed to Mr. and Mrs. hisfirstname hislastname -- but it's so much fun when a telemarketer asks for Mrs. hislastname and I can say "Sorry, there's no one by that name here," before hanging up on them.
Sorry again for breaking the rules....
I went by my middle name up until junior high because there were three other girls at the school with the same name, and then went by my first name, so I'm used to changing names and my family still calls me by one name and my friends by another. I like that.
I think if I had been older when I got married, I might have not changed my name or kept my name professionally. But since I got married at 20, all of my diplomas and papers and such have the same name on them.
In Mexico, I believe, they have some sort of scheme like the one suggested above where everyone takes both their parents names and when women get married they replace one of them with their husband's father's name. (I don't remember the details exactly though) It's all in the traditions, it's not like any way is "right."
First marriage, right after graduating from Caltech, 1987. My name was Evans, his was Sarapata. I hated it. It was always mistaken for Sarah Pata and filed under the wrong initial letter. Four kids, all with his name.
Second, 2000, young French guy who didn't even consider that I might take his name but was thrilled when I did. Maindrault--his family laughs when I try to pronounce it.
The inconveniences? My kids' names don't match mine, which isn't really a problem. I have the name I graduated from college under, the name I published under, and the name I graduated from nursing school under. And I didn't get considered for UCLA med school years ago because they filed my application half under my maiden name and half under my (first) married name.
We live in the Bay Area, where there are many family configurations, and many parent partners with different names--so our arrangement is not at all unusual. Most (doctor's offices, schools, and so on) do not assume that we have the same name. I do not think there's a perfect solution to this problem. As with many things, there is "choice" for women -- many above posted they changed their names b/c they didn't like the one they had -- but with choice there is a kind of burden. For example, I harbor a small sadness that we in my family don't all have the same last name--but who to "blame"? Only me, because I opted to keep the name I was born with.
The question shouldn't be is it anti-feminist for a woman to take her husband's name, it should be why are men still allowed to sit back whilst the women in their lives jump through hoops to please them. I'd say it showed a profound lack of respect towards women on behalf of the man if he's expecting his wife to take his name.