To think women taking their husband’s name doesn’t have to be sexist?

[RealNavyEagle]

I know it’s a traditional thing and some people see it as outdated or patriarchal but I actually think there’s something quite nice about a whole family sharing the same name. It doesn’t feel like “losing my identity” to me, just part of building a shared one.

AIBU to think it’s not automatically a regressive choice and that it can just be a personal one?

I've recently been researching our family trees. The consistency of the man's name being taken has made it less difficult.

But this practice just makes it harder to trace women. How many people know their grandmother's or great grandmother's maiden name? How would you find them in a census (pre-marriage) without this information? I've recently had to do this with my grandmother and it only worked because I knew her maiden name and date of birth.

Of course historically no one cared about this because, unless they were royal, the women weren't important to family lines.

The child does take the mother's name!

Yes, it betrays a certain worldview doesn't it? It's just easier to think of it as a family name and not talk about the inherent sexism or the impact on women. Which is true if you're someone who doesn't like it when those things are discussed, I suppose!

How does that square with my lesbian friend who took her wife's surname and kept it after they divorced to keep the same name as their kids??

My DC's new secondary headteacher is a Ms.

I have always known my grandmother's maiden name. My grandfather took it and it was given to my mother. Notwithstanding that I have always known my great grandmother's maiden name and her mother's maiden name.

How strange you do not. Have you never discussed your family with them.

My surname is quite difficult to spell and pronounce. So I kept it on marriage and gave it to my children.

It doesn't. It's easily available from marriage certificates. I would agree that both parents should have and should now, feature on those.

How strange you do not. Have you never discussed your family with them.

I mean I literally just said in my post that I've done some family history and know my grandmother's maiden name. I highly doubt that most people know their great grandmothers' and great great grandmothers' maiden names.

It’s the fact that it’s the default and that so many men won’t negotiate on it that makes me feel uncomfortable. We’ve double barrelled - everything in our marriage is as equal as we can make it.

Power dynamics are very subtle and I think we live in a world where women should ensure they receive equality. For some couples, it makes zero difference what your surname is but for many, women don’t want to automatically feel they should take their husbands and why should they?!

But your husband wasn’t happy to take your surname or for your joint children to have your surname. Therefore you followed sexist traditions by taking his name.

It's so rude: as is the seeming automatic assumption that every adult woman must be styled 'Mrs'. I'd mind less were this an automatic practice on adulthood, as in Germany and France, but here it's still an expectation that women must have special labels denoting our sexual status.

I've been Ms since around age 16, and Dr after that. Were I to switch from university to school teaching, I'd be Ms. I've been married since 2008 and my expectation was that no one would give a fig what women chose to call ourselves. It affects no one else but us, after all.

I couldn't have been more wrong. I've have been blown away on occasion by other women - it's always been women, unfortunately - trying to put me back into what they see as my box. I also no longer believe it's a growing trend for women to continue using their own names on marriage: this practice seems now to be in reverse.

The posts upthread about tracing ancestry are equally depressing. It's as though when women marry, we disappear.

What I do think is mad (and sexist) is the number of unmarried women who give their kids their (often absent or feckless) father's surname.

I've been married 25 years and it never really occurred to me at the time not to change my name. Plus his is objectively a better/easier to say/spell name.

But if I'd had kids unmarried they'd have had my name! Not sure what I'd have done if we'd got divorced. Now I've been my married name as long as my maiden name so it'd feel really odd to change even if we got divorced!

Surely you would go through wedding records ? I did know my grandmother's maiden name a few of her sons and then grandsons had it as a middle name, and my gran had her mum's original surname as a middle name.

I only took my husband's name as I hated mine, and his was more "normal", after years of grief as a child due to my stepfather's name being foisted upon me as a kid. I'm now divorced and have chosen a brand new name for myself. Kids have become no contact with their father and considering changing to mine.

Essentially, yes, it is generally an outdated, sexist tradition if you just do it as it's expected of you. Mind you, that's also how I consider marriage these days. My personal views, but I do expect others to think differently.

Surely you would go through wedding records ?

But that's the difference isn't it. For women you need to have a marriage certificate to find their maiden name to then look up other information. My grandmother had 5 sisters, I know all of their maiden names (as they're the same) but I then needed to know their married names to look them up in other places.

Of course there's no simple solution here as you can't have both people pass down their names, I'm just saying the current system disadvantages women.

Do you think that perhaps many women feel less attached to their surnames because they've been brought up more or less since birth to believe that their surnames are only temporary until they marry a man and so it's not worth getting too attached to them?

I remember even as far back as primary school practising what my first name sounded like with the surname of every boy I had a crush on. The idea that I might not marry a man and that if I did I might not take his name never crossed my mind.

Then I ended up marrying a man at the age of 32 and not changing my name because by then I'd given it too much thought and it just seemed like an absolutely bizarre thing to do.

I was happy to choose DH's surname.
Mine came from my mother but she no longer used it and it was from some not very feminist choices her mother made. My family was a hotch-potch of varying surnames, so my surname wasn't a unifying bond between us.

There is the element that it wouldn't spontaneously occur to DH to change his surname, but also it does link him (and our children) to his culture. I had no desire to make him change it to make a feminist point.

Our surnames did not combine well to double-barrel. Fusing them would also not have worked effectively.

I was happy to change to match DH and our family to share a name that links to their culture, and their cousins. It wasn't an onerous change for me and I was happy to move into a new chapter of life.

Long term I think it would be unlikely for me to change again. I wouldn't want to change my surname to be different to my children while they're dependent. It would take something fairly cataclysmic to make me revert to my original surname.

Other people make different choices in different circumstances and that's fine. They have other considerations, logistics, attachments and possibly more interesting combinations of names to play with.

What really matters more is the equality of the relationship, not the name choices.

Which child? OP says ‘To think women taking their husband’s name doesn’t have to be sexist?’

So in OP’s scenario, both woman and child take man’s name.

Very true.

That said, how people traced records from before the internet and DNA ages is basically moot now. If any of our descendants want to trace us, they're not going to be limited to registry office documentation. It comes up all the time in these threads, and I never understand why.

i inherited my last name from my dad, but it is mine now. it is also the name of every other woman in our family on my dad's side. it's not just my dad's name. my mother's last name is one of my middle names. my unique name is all my own and i have been called it since i was born.

children should take their mother's name. the mother is the one who gave birth to them!

What really pisses me off is when other people push their own ideologies onto my decisions.

I chose to change my name purely because my maiden name is unusual so it made me very easy to find online and I was sick to shitting god of having to spell it out all the time. I wanted a common name and my husband had one.

Not everything has to be a power play.

I don't see why it's any more sexist to "belong" to your husband than your dad. When women say they are keeping their name to fight the patriachy, usually the surname is from their dad anyway, and he still walks them down the aisle to give away to the husband.
I'd rather just have the same name as my children above all else.

@NoSoupForU no one's saying that. But the counter argument could be if it pissed you off that much you could have changed it earlier.

Both are sexist assumptions. I belong to neither. Being a sentient human rather than a possession I have been 'given away' by no one.

My name, however, very much belongs to me just as much as it does my brother.