Why should married women change their names?

[Marie]

This is crazy...

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlin...f-fraud-for-taking-wifes-name-then-backs-off/

A Florida man is behind the wheel of his car again after the Department of Motor Vehicles suspended and then restored his license — accusing him of fraud at first because he changed his last name to his wife’s.

 

[Second Summer]

With the strict proviso that I am not sure of the actual importance of this ..

When the fathers name is carried on it acts as an accurate Y chromosone tracker through the generations.

With nowt to blame but Mother Nature carrying the Mothers surname is not an accurate tracker of anything.

Just seems churlish to me to replace anything that does something with something that does nothing.

We all get the mitochondrial DNA exclusively from our mothers.

 

[SummerRain]

If it was traditional for women to walk five steps behind their husbands, but it wasn't compulsory for them to do so, yet most/almost all of them did, I think this same argument would apply.

Do those of you who think that there is no significance to wives changing their names to their husband's also think that there would be no significance to women walking five steps behind their husbands?

Sure, if the situation was the same: women wanted to do it, they were happy to do it, their husbands didn't mind if they didn't do it, nobody coerced them into it or judged them for not doing it, nothing bad happened if they didn't do it, etc. I would think women had a right to walk where they chose to, without anybody - be that their husband or other women - telling them where they should walk.

I certainly wouldn't tell them they ought to walk somewhere/way else than where they chose.

It's not that I don't understand why women wouldn't want to take on their husbands name, and as I said before, I think if that's what they believe/want that's exactly what they should do. But the way I see it, it's just as bad to tell a women (or indeed, anybody) she shouldn't take her spouses name as it is to tell her she should. It should be her choice.

 

[Muggle]

As far as I view it, it's the woman's choice. If she wants to change her name, and if she wants to do it, not that she's forced to do it or feels obligated to do it, then nobody should judge her. Same if men want to take their partner's name. Same if a couple decided to make up a new surname. Their choice.

I'm never going to get married but if I did, I would be keeping my surname. Hell would freeze over before I would ever considering changing my surname.

 

[Clueless Git]

We all get the mitochondrial DNA exclusively from our mothers.

Just read up on that. Quite interesting!

I'm never going to get married but if I did, I would be keeping my surname. Hell would freeze over before I would ever considering changing my surname.

Totaly random question because random is the way my head works ...

Why would a woman (who doesn't like the idea of women taking their husband's names) keep their father's name instead of reverting to their mothers or their grandmothers or their great grandmothers ... ad-finitum?

 

[yally]

Pretty sure Annie took her mums name as soon as she could.

 

[mlp]

Putting this up on a Friday evening because it’s already causing Outrage on the Guardian, Twitter and my personal Facebook account:

Women shouldn’t change their names when they get married.

I'd like to skip over some of the basic objections and hopefully steer the conversation here toward something more interesting. My Guardian column was purposely a bit hyperbolic and strongly-worded, intended as a push-back on I CHOOSE MY CHOICE! feminism, or the idea that just because a woman chooses something, it’s a feminist choice or even a neutral one. I make anti-feminist choices all the time, so I’m not saying that you are a Bad Feminist for changing your name. And yes, some women don’t have a choice to change their names or not, and social pressure to change your name is enormous, making it at the very least an incredibly coerced choice. But I rarely hear recognition of that; instead, it’s just “well feminism is about CHOICE and I CHOSE!” Ok. Well, we also need to look at what’s going on when 90% of women change their names upon marriage (more now, by the way, than 20 years ago) and when 50% of the American population thinks women should be legally required to change their names upon marriage. Yes, if you’re one of the 90% of women who changed your name, you may feel judged when a feminist is like, “Don’t change your name.” But in the rest of the real world, it’s the 10% of women who do change their names who get a lot more push-back. And of course people have all sorts of reasons for changing their names and of course they’re a little more diverse than “I want to subsume my own identity into my husband’s.” But in the tradition of heterosexual marriage, that’s what name-changing was. That is, quite literally, what name-changing still is — it is changing your identity. And taking your husband’s. Also everything Kate Harding says here.

But I suspect feminists are never going to agree on this one, because it is very personal. What’s more personal than your name, after all? (Exactly, the cranky feminist says). What I’d rather focus on here is this:

Identities matter, and the words we put on things are part of how we make them real. There’s a power in naming that feminists and social justice activists have long highlighted. Putting a word to the most obvious social dynamics is the first step toward ending inequality. Words like “sexism” and “racism” make clear that different treatment based on sex or race is something other than the natural state of things; the invention of the term “Ms” shed light on the fact that men simply existed in the world while women were identified based on their marital status.​

Your name is your identity. The term for you is what situates you in the world. The cultural assumption that women will change their names upon marriage – the assumption that we’ll even think about it, and be in a position where we make a “choice” of whether to keep our names or take our husbands’ – cannot be without consequence. Part of how our brains function and make sense of a vast and confusing universe is by naming and categorizing. When women see our names as temporary or not really ours, and when we understand that part of being a woman is subsuming your own identity into our husband’s, that impacts our perception of ourselves and our role in the world. It lessens the belief that our existence is valuable unto itself, and that as individuals we are already whole. It disassociates us from ourselves, and feeds into a female understanding of self as relational – we are not simply who we are, we are defined by our role as someone’s wife or mother or daughter or sister.​

I’ve never been able to find a study on this, but I have to think that there’s some psychological consequence of raising half the population with the idea that the primary name for themselves is temporary. You don’t escape that on an individual level by not changing your name, although we do shift the culture when a critical mass of women stop changing their names. But I think there’s something to the idea that an understanding of one’s own name as temporary feeds into an understanding of one’s identity as less fully developed — that when women are collectively raised in a society where we get our “real” names only after we find someone to marry us, that we understand our own identities as inherently tied to someone else. And so yes, name-changing is a “choice” and people should do whatever they want when they get married and etc etc. But the normalization of marital name-changing isn’t just a long-time sexist practice; it influences our basic understanding of ourselves and our roles in the world.

Reposting the above from Ansciess's post above, both in the hope that those who couldn't read it before now can, and in the further hope that everyone might actually read it.

 

[Clueless Git]

Pretty sure Annie took her mums name as soon as she could.

Which means she took her grandfather's name rather than take her grandmother's name or her grandmother's mother's name?

 

[Pickle Juice]

Reposting the above from Ansciess's post above, both in the hope that those who couldn't read it before now can, and in the further hope that everyone might actually read it.

I do appreciate this bit...

My Guardian column was purposely a bit hyperbolic and strongly-worded, intended as a push-back on I CHOOSE MY CHOICE! feminism, or the idea that just because a woman chooses something, it’s a feminist choice or even a neutral one.

not just because I often get purposely hyperbolic and strong worded, but because no one ever seems to take into account that choices made under any kind of pressure are not choices. If I'm being held at gunpoint at the edge of a cliff, and I can either let the person shoot me dead, or jump off the cliff to my death, those aren't choices. [/hyperbolic analogy]

 

[Clueless Git]

... But the normalization of marital name-changing isn’t just a long-time sexist practice; it influences our basic understanding of ourselves and our roles in the world.

Reposting the above from Ansciess's post above, both in the hope that those who couldn't read it before now can, and in the further hope that everyone might actually read it.

Apart from perpetualy hyphenating family names (just call me Clueless Smith-Brown-Jones-Stephenson-Black-White-Brown-Wilson-Mann-Taylor-Thomas-Jackson-Clarke-Stephenson .. ad-finitum .. ) is there actualy a sensible solution to that problem?

 

[mlp]

Totaly random question because random is the way my head works ...

Why would a woman (who doesn't like the idea of women taking their husband's names) keep their father's name instead of reverting to their mothers or their grandmothers or their great grandmothers ... ad-finitum?

Well, in my case, my name is neither my mother's, my father's or my stepfather's. It's the name of the man my mother was married to at the time I was conceived, but no longer married to at the time I was born. I don't associate it with anyone other than myself - it's the name I learned as being mine from the time any of us learn our names.

When I was in grade school, my mother and stepfather asked me if I wanted to be adopted by him. I asked whether it would change anything about us as a family, and they said no, it would just change my last name to his. I said that in that case I didn't see the need, since I was perfectly fine with my name, and we were family in any case. I could not have loved my stepfather more if he had adopted me, or if he had been my birth father - that love was completely separate from whether we shared a last name or not.

My sister took her first husband's name. After she divorced him, she reverted to her prior surname, which was the same as mine. When she married again, she took her husband's name. When she divorced him, she took our mother's maiden name, which is actually the surname of my mother's maternal grandmother - the surname that I bear and that she had before and between her marriages has unpleasant memories for her, and she wanted a name without those unpleasant connotations. So now her son and I are the only ones who share that surname. (My nephew doesn't bear the surname of his father, who was an abusive git.)

 

[mlp]

Apart from perpetualy hyphenating family names (just call me Clueless Smith-Brown-Jones-Stephenson-Black-White-Brown-Wilson-Mann-Taylor-Thomas-Jackson-Clarke-Stephenson .. ad-finitum .. ) is there actualy a sensible solution to that problem?

A lot of cultures manage it in one way or another. There are a number of cultures where girls carry their mothers' names and boys their fathers'. In some cases, new names are chosen. In some cultures, the name of each child at birth is a baby name, and when the child comes of name, s/he choses an adult name, or one is chosen for her/him. In some *native* traditions, the surname is a clan name, not a nuclear family name, and in some traditions, the wife enters the husband's clan upon marriage, while in others, the man enters the wife's clan.

I don't think the issue is so much whether people keep their names on marriage, select a new name, or whether one spouse takes the name of the other. The issue is the societal assumption that women will be the ones to take their husband's name, an assumption that is meaningful by virtue of the fact that it is so overwhelmingly followed.

 

[Moll Flanders]

I understand the article obviously but personally I would have chosen to change my surname even if I had chosen to have a civil partnership with a woman. I don't like that there is a cultural/societal expectation for the woman to change her surname and if I had different circumstances I wouldn't have changed my surname when I got married.

I don't regret my decision to change my name at all though and I have no intention of having children and carrying on the family name or whatever.

 

[Muggle]

Totaly random question because random is the way my head works ...

Why would a woman (who doesn't like the idea of women taking their husband's names) keep their father's name instead of reverting to their mothers or their grandmothers or their great grandmothers ... ad-finitum?

I do have my mother's surname. It took me 9 years before I could legally change my surname (due to having to be a certain age before you can legally change your surname) from the cunt's but for those 9 years I called myself by my mother's surname (she changed back to it after the divorce) because my (then) legal surname made me a part of that *******'s family and he's not my ******* family.

 

[mlp]

I understand the article obviously but personally I would have chosen to change my surname even if I had chosen to have a civil partnership with a woman. I don't like that there is a cultural/societal expectation for the woman to change her surname and if I had different circumstances I wouldn't have changed my surname when I got married.

I don't regret my decision to change my name at all though and I have no intention of having children and carrying on the family name or whatever.

Yes, I don't think we can argue that names aren't meaningful for most of us. The very fact that we change our names or make a decision to keep our names is proof that names are meaningful.

When I got divorced, I thought about changing my surname to the same one my sister had finally chosen - that of our great-great-grandmother - because by that time I knew why my surname (her former surname) had negative connotations for her, and as a show of solidarity with her. (And divorce is such an easy time to change one's surname, whether or not one has taken one's husband's name.)

I ultimately decided to keep my name because I don't associate it with anyone other than myself. I doubt that there's anyone else alive who has the same name as I do - my first name, although an ancient one, is not used much, and the combination of my three names is unusual. When I was little, and apprehensive about something, I used to say to myself, "I am [first/middle/last name], and I can do this", so yes, I definitely feel that my name is part of my identity.

I mean, we even choose our online user names for a reason, don't we?

 

[Freesia]

Its funny, but I dont mind having my the name of my father. The problem I do have though is I have a lot of unhappy memories with this name, of having it mocked at school and I have a lot of negative baggage from being me, so if I were to get a new name it would feel like a fresh start.

 

[Freesia]

Also, I wonder if a lot of women take on their husband's name because they want to seem married, and get the status which comes along with being an obviously married woman, ie "Mrs Smith" instead of "Miss Jones".

 

[mlp]

It's also interesting that the proper form of address for a woman who takes her husband's name isn't "Mrs. Jill Jones" - it's "Mrs. John Jones." Likewise, when addressing something to them as a couple, it's "Mr. and Mrs. John Jones", not "John and Jill Jones." The wife's identity is completely subsumed into the husband's.

 

[Freesia]

Yes that is weird. Ive seen that before.

 

[RabbitLuvr]

I don't like my given names.

Really, though, I feel awkward whenever I have to speak any names. I have issues where I can remember people and I can remember names, but I frequently can't link the person and the name together. I'm constantly afraid I have someone's name wrong. Even people I've known for years. There is a split second after I say someone's name that I'm always worried I've got it wrong.

I don't even like saying my husband's first name aloud; I always address him by a nickname, never his given name. (After six years together I still forget his middle name and don't know his phone number, either.)