While retaining one’s maiden name upon marriage has historically been pretty
closely affiliated with feminism, it’s also a sign that, for a lot of women,
adult identity is now already established well before getting wed.
The first American woman to publicly insist on retaining her maiden name upon
marriage was reportedly the abolitionist and suffragette Lucy Stone, who kept
being Stone after her 1855 wedding to social reformer (and Republican Party
founder) Henry Browne Blackwell. Today, the
, which advocates
for women’s equality, keeps up the tradition, urging women to retain their own
surnames, “because a person’s name is fundamental to his/her existence.”
What’s really going on in America is probably something much more prosaic.
Feminism as a defined movement actually appears to be
in the United States now consider themselves feminists.
(In the United Kingdom it’s only
.) The reason for the
name change refusal is likely tied to the fact that, over the last 50 years, the
age at the time of the first marriage has
. Today, the average woman is 27 years old when she first gets
married. In 1990, she was 23. In 1960, the average bride was
only
years old.
The results of this should be unsurprising: Many women already have careers
by the time they marry. They have college degrees or law partnerships and
published work. It’s time-consuming and difficult for a woman to change all of
the documents affiliated with such things and convince people from networks past
and present to start calling her something else.
There are important implications for name changes. While some 10.1 percent of
American college students
agreed with the
statement that “a woman keeping her name was less committed to her
marriage,” women in higher prestige jobs (medicine, the arts or entertainment)
are
most
likely to keep their names.
Part of this may stem from a desire to avoid having to change it back. The
intricacies of this can get rather outlandish for women who have the misfortune
of marrying multiple times. One could end up with problems like that of Demi
Moore, an actress whose identity constitutes a sort of coral reef of failed
marriages. She grew up Demi Guynes, but she achieved fame under another surname.
“Moore” is technically the legacy of a marriage that ended in 1985. She was also
compelled to change her Twitter handle last year—having somewhat ill-advisedly
gone with @mrskutcher—when her third marriage, to actor Ashton Kutcher,
collapsed.
Whether or not one retains one’s name is affiliated with all sorts of
professional and class implications. In the most extensive look at women’s
naming conventions ever conducted, a
2009
study published in
Social Behavior &
Personality, researchers…
…used data obtained from wedding announcements in the New York
Times newspaper from 1971 through 2005 to test 9 hypotheses related to
brides’ decisions to change or retain their maiden names upon marriage. A trend
was found in brides keeping their surname, and correlates included the bride’s
occupation, education, age, and the type of ceremony (religious versus
nonsectarian). There was mixed support for the hypothesis that a photograph of
the bride alone would signal a lower incidence of name keeping.
The more traditional a marriage appears—young bride, no professional degree,
religious ceremony—the more likely Jane Smith will become Jane Doe.
Research shows women are perhaps rather career savvy when keeping their
names. In a Dutch study
published in 2010,
researchers looked into the perceptions people had of women’s competence and
intelligence based on their use (or not) of their husbands’ surnames:
A woman who took her partner’s name … was judged as more caring, more
dependent, less intelligent, more emotional, less competent, and less ambitious
in comparison with a woman who kept her own name. A woman with her own name, on
the other hand, was judged as less caring, more independent, more ambitious,
more intelligent, and more competent…. A job applicant who took her partner’s
name, in comparison with one with her own name, was less likely to be hired for
a job and her monthly salary was estimated €361 lower.
That’s $472 a month. Basically, women appear more like successful
professionals when they keep their names.
But it’s not necessarily one or the other. There’s also the sort-of name
change. As one academic
explained earlier
this year in
New York magazine, “the 5 to 10 percent of women who keep
their names — ‘and that includes hyphenators’ — does not account for
‘situational name users,’ those who go by different names in different
circumstances.” And, while it’s impossible to verify this, because it’s
definitionally unofficial, this appears to be very common.
The singer Beyoncé Knowles, for instance, called her world 2013 tour the
Mrs. Carter
Show (this is odd on a few levels, but mostly because her husband, while
born Shawn Carter, is known now as simply
Jay-Z).
There are a lot of people like her, who use different names in different places.
Her name is Beyoncé Knowles, but she’s commonly known as just Beyoncé. She’s
legally Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. Maybe her grandmother sends her letters
addressed to Mrs. Shawn Carter. There are probably even some people who call her
Mrs. Z.
This isn’t to say that women who retain their own names aren’t at some level
feminists. The
common
definition of feminism is the belief that men and women are legally,
politically, and socially equal. These women often have jobs where they compete
with men, and win, on a regular basis. But they’re mostly not very strident
about women’s liberation.
Or they’re not as strident as first-wave feminists, a group whose agenda
televangelist Pat Robertson once (bizarrely)
characterized as
“not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family
political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their
children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” His
statement was an exaggeration, but it reflects a common perception of early
feminists as extreme.
Today’s newly married women might be low-level feminists, but more
importantly they often come to the altar with careers and their well-established
identities and property; their own condos and cars. So, they’ve got husbands
now. That doesn’t mean they have to change their whole identities and start
calling themselves something else.
As the
Social Behavior & Personality study put it:
In the case of women who are business owners, senior level executives,
professionals (e.g., physicians, attorneys), and those with careers in the arts
and entertainment fields, their names are distinctly associated with the work
they have produced, almost akin to a “brand.”
This doesn’t seem to matter in many foreign countries at all. In Hispanic
nations this appears to be a non-issue. Women simply retain their own names from
birth until death. This has nothing to do with the power of women in society and
their ability to vote, hold political office, or own businesses and control
property. This is also true, interestingly enough, in
most
Arabic-speaking countries; women retain their own names upon marriage.
What we’re seeing in America is that the older the bride, and the better her
job, the more likely she is to keep her name. In the long run, that’s probably a
good idea for her career (that’s $472 a month). This is true even without the
killing children, destroying capitalism, and practicing witchcraft hyperbole. It
just doesn’t make a lot of sense to take on a new name after putting so much
effort into establishing the original one.
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