I went to a lecture last night and one of the points that came up was about surnames, so I thought the MN feminists might be interested since it relates to those arguments about taking or not taking one's husband's name.
I've often heard people say that by keeping your 'maiden' name, all you're doing is keeping one man's name in preference to another man's name. Of course there are arguments against that (it's the name you've been known by all your life, etc.), but I thought this was interesting:
Apparently, lots of common English surnames like Brewster, Baxter, Webster, come from Anglo-Saxon words that have been given a feminine ending. So, a Brewer is a male maker of beer; a Brewster is a female maker of beer. A Baker is a man; a Bake-ster (Baxter) is a woman, and so on.
So, it seems - although we can't prove exactly how it happened - that at some point in history, families took the names of a female breadwinner.
I have no idea how significant this is in academic terms, but it's rather nice, isn't it? 