Late night thoughts... women changing surnames after marriage

[FatJan]

Not sure if this is the right board as I'm not fully sure where I'm going with this yet! Feels vaguely right, but happy for it to be moved.

Basically, I was scrolling through social media this evening and clicked on a post from a girl I knew at school which had got lots of comments.

As I scrolled down the post, I saw a load of comments from women whose names I didn't recognise.

I thought it was a bit strange I didn't recognise/couldn't remember who they were because the post was about something that happened at the school, and they were all talking as if they'd been there.

Suddenly I realised that I did actually know all of the women - they were all girls from our year.

I hadn't realised because they've all got married and now have their husbands' surnames.

It gave me a weird and not particularly pleasant feeling.

I haven't followed these ladies' lives over the years as they weren't in my close friendship circle, but I remember them well and how they were as children and teenagers.

Something about the fact that the identities they had when they were young no longer exist (on paper anyway) and they all have their husbands' names now made me feel a bit upset, which surprised me.

I'm trying to explore that feeling and I thought writing it down/sharing it might be a good place to start.

Obviously being happily married isn't a bad thing, so I think it's more the (perceived) loss of old identity thing that has given me a jolt, probably linked to the fact that men get to keep theirs.

I think it was also related to the fact it wasn't just one woman with a new name, it was the entire friendship group. It made it seem like the 'thing' to do, and I suppose it is, although I'm not sure how I feel about that. Some of the girls were very outspoken feminist types and to see them all as wives now with their husbands' name was a bit unexpected.

To be honest, I've been very in-my-head with the Sarah and Sabina cases and the ongoing discussions around things women go through that men don't, and this might be impacting the way I responded emotionally to that particular post.

Does the above make sense at all? Has anyone noticed or felt something similar?

@YetAnotherSpartacus

Not read the thread but can guess the content

• I wanted to change mine and feminism is about choice
• I never liked mine because it was my stepdad's
• Mine was hard to pronounce
• I preferred DH's
• Mine was hard to spell
• It just didn't worry me (some comment about global warming)
• DH wanted me to and I love him
• I wanted the same surname as my DCs (no explanation of why the DCs would take DHs name).

So predictable.

I agree with you OP.

Bingo!

The only one you missed was that they had a dickhead father and wanted to get rid of their name. No explanation why they just didn’t take any other name at any other time.

I didn't change my name upon marriage and have had similar experiences as some of the posters here - eg my husband's side of the family address cards to "Mr and Mrs (husband's surname)". As someone here said, it's surprising how invested some people are in maintaining the status quo.

OP, I agree with you - I do see a name change as a loss of identity. I've always felt that way to an extent, but I wonder if it's a viewpoint that grows stronger with age - the more accomplishments you have, the more qualifications or awards, publications, the more people know you by that name, the more it sticks. As I got older, I also became more annoyed that it was something I was expected to do.

The title is the annoying thing, for me. Although I've always chosen "Ms" when asked, sometimes on online forms it's not available, so I was a Miss for some things and have had to change it since - I thought keeping my name would save that sort of administrative fuss, but no.

We applied for a joint mortgage shortly after we'd got married, I gave "Ms" as my title and it appeared as "Miss" on the mortgage paperwork (a mistake I can't imagine happening if we'd both had the same surname). I asked to change it, and it still appears as "Miss" so I will have to ask again. I assume it doesn't particularly matter - giving the wrong title wouldn't stop a credit check going through, for example. But if it doesn't matter, why even ask for it?

@brittleheadgirl I've been married twice and I still have the name I was born with. The second time my daughter gave me away. I knew she was longing to

@YetAnotherSpartacus

Not read the thread but can guess the content

• I wanted to change mine and feminism is about choice
• I never liked mine because it was my stepdad's
• Mine was hard to pronounce
• I preferred DH's
• Mine was hard to spell
• It just didn't worry me (some comment about global warming)
• DH wanted me to and I love him
• I wanted the same surname as my DCs (no explanation of why the DCs would take DHs name).

So predictable.

I agree with you OP.

Yeppppppp

@AICM

Many men wear wedding rings

Men never wear engagement rings.
Men never expect to be bought an engagement ring.

My DH had an engagement ring- we exchanged rings when we got engaged and again when we got married. He stopped wearing it when he developed arthritis in his hands.

The only one you missed was that they had a dickhead father and wanted to get rid of their name. No explanation why they just didn’t take any other name at any other time.

I did actually try to explain that. I think it’s disingenuous to pretend that changing your name on marriage and picking another random surname at a random time is the same thing. The latter would have deeply hurt my siblings and involved giving very personal explanations to all kinds of people, including work colleagues, about why I was changing my name in that way.

And, as I said, there was significance for me in the act of taking the name of a man I’d chosen for myself, and shedding a name associated with a man I hadn’t chosen - which branded me as his property (in his eyes).

If that makes me a bad feminist then so be it, but I don’t think sneering at victims of male abuse for their choices is particularly feminist either. I think it’s important to remember that women have different experiences of patriarchal oppression - which means that what one woman views as suppression can be liberation for another.

Has anyone mentioned that a really big problem about changing your name is that you lose your career history - or have to add all sorts of provisos to prevent that happening? It's like changing the URL on your website or your phone number.
The only good reasons to change surname, imo, is if you want to be a criminal mastermind or a spy.
My name is different from my DCs. And hugely advantageous this was when an institution rang me to bully me (illegally) as a mother - and discovered, with horror, they were also speaking to someone who had significant oversight of their organisation and how it was being run.

@CuriousCassie

Has anyone mentioned that a really big problem about changing your name is that you lose your career history - or have to add all sorts of provisos to prevent that happening? It's like changing the URL on your website or your phone number. The only good reasons to change surname, imo, is if you want to be a criminal mastermind or a spy. My name is different from my DCs. And hugely advantageous this was when an institution rang me to bully me (illegally) as a mother - and discovered, with horror, they were also speaking to someone who had significant oversight of their organisation and how it was being run.

Would wanting to change your surname also count as a good reason?

Do you judge women who are not spies or criminals but still change their name on marriage Curiosity?

I don't judge anyone on this issue, @AICM. Why should I bother? Their lives.
I'm pointing out the only cases where I personally see any advantage in changing a name: if I wanted to be a super-criminal with several passports. Or spy, ditto.
Otherwise I - personally - would see it as deleting my past for no very good reason. Men don't do it very often
But as I say, quite happy for any one else - even somebody who is on this board as as set of initials - to have a different opinion. No skin off my nose.

For me it’s the principle - why should a woman’s identity be seen as less important than her husband’s? If men changed their surnames to their partners’ as much as women do (it must be 99.99% women changing their names), I wouldn’t argue against it but it’s always the woman changing hers. And because one reason given is children, if a woman gets married again, she often ends up with a different surname to her kids anyway. Far easier for them to have her surname from the start.

How can women ever expect to be treated equally if it’s generally accepted that our identity is less important than men’s?

I know a lot of people on here won’t see it that way but to me that’s absolutely the case. You get married, you lose your name to become that of your husband because his name takes precedence.

I would never change to my name to that of a partner’s (unless Aidan Turner asked me in which case I would throw all my feminist principles out of the window*).

*Obviously a joke.....

Notahandmaid I couldn't agree more.

Doubtless many women on MN / this thread are keen to get rid of the association with their father, but I can't quite believe it's so proportionally more women than men that have awful fathers, do we're back to either ignoring or acknowledging that women's identities are viewed as much less important / permanent than men's, and therefore they're societally encouraged to change their name while men are not.

To try and attribute this to wanting to be rid of an association with a father is disingenuous

Yes, that’s a very good point.
I think a lot of women decide they are going to change their name because they want to be recognised as a wife and then have to find justifications for their decision. Hence all the reasons that YetAnotherSpartacus lists.

Women cannot complain about being seen as second class citizens if they are happy to give up their name in favour of a man’s so readily as soon as they get married. We could make a start by asserting that our identity is as important as men’s and refusing to be Mrs Hisname.

We gave our child both our names, hyphenated, it was (surprisingly to me) very easy, registrar asked no questions whatsoever. This felt perfect - we each have our own name and the arrival of a child with both names makes us a complete family unit forever. It feels romantic somehow?

Just my 2 cts.

Child may hate us when learning to write though, that's a few extra letters to draw in there.

Yes, @Hoping4second many do this as the ideal compromise but how many children do you know who have double barrelled names by the time they go to school? I have two DCs, one GC, run a youth group and employ a lot of young people and I only know ONE child known by their double barrelled name and that’s their father’s family name.

The idea of double barrelling is almost always lost before the child starts playgroup IME. Might be “romantic” but it isn’t smashing the patriarchy.

So, no solution is perfect, but double barrelled is her legal name. It's on her passport (easier to travel alone with her) on all the little tags I sewed onto her clothes, it'll be among the first things she writes. It's also on our doorbell letterbox etc. People who've never met us before (new school, hospital, etc etc) don't need explaining that Baby Doe-Smith belongs to me, Jane Doe, and also to her dad, John Smith. The names just make it obvious, regardless of whether we ever to separate and / or remarry.

Of course it'll get shortened in everyday use and she may well drop my name at some point if she doesn't want her grandkids to have a full paragraph for a legal name.

But I do feel it's a better compromise than just pretending I didn't have an identity / family of my own before marriage.

Almost all my friends on social media identify themselves by their birth name and their married name (if they changed it). I have come to like the American style.

I thought long and hard about it with my second marriage. With my first marriage I just took his name without a second thought, and later regretted it, I went back to my maiden name as soon as we separated.

At first I wasn’t going to change it at all, which DH was totally fine with. And I certainly didn’t want to be a Mrs after having spent the last 10 years saying “it’s Ms, actually” to every “is that Miss or Mrs” question.

But in the end I decided on Ms my name his name (no hyphen). I don’t see it as changing my name, just adding his to mine. And he didn’t change his, which I am fine with, it’s my choice.

And I fully accept there is probably some kind of internalised misogyny/ romantic idealist bollocks in there somewhere as to why I suddenly felt like I wanted to have his name as well as my own, but I can live with that. It works for me.

As an aside, I do actually know two men who changed their name to their wife’s, so it does happen (though probably the exception that proves the rule…)