I know that today, the majority of women still change their last name when they get married. In fact, a 2006 article claimed that 80% of American women still choose to participate in the tradition. This number is much lower for academics, which I know from personal experience (I can only think of one female professor at Yale who even hyphenated her last name) and from a study that I can't find now that said only 30% of female academics change their last name.
The sexist symbolism inherent in the assumption that women will change their last names when they get married is left over from the days when US law followed the doctrine of coverture. This doctrine meant women had no legal rights; their father was legally responsible for them until they got married, when the husband took over. Who had coverture of a woman, including all of her property, was indicated by her last name, either her father's or her husband's. (Fun fact: Because women legally couldn't have property, husbands not only had to leave property to their sons in their will, but had to give custody of their children to a male relative - not the mother. If your husband died when you had a child that was, for example, five years old, that child became the "property" of one of your husband's male relatives, and not you).
Some people are content to say that since the US no longer abides by the doctrine of coverture, changing your last name is just a tradition. A nice tradition that enables you to share a last name, make it easier for people to know you're married, and for both of you to have the same last name as your children. But why is it the woman's responsibility to ensure all of these things? Why is it still the woman who has to change her last name?
Because it is a sexist tradition, a symbol that reinforces gender stereotypes and women's inferiority. I've heard many a (conservative) religious person argue that women should change their last names because doing so recognizes the man's headship of the family. And while I disagree with them that the idea of male headship is a great, necessary thing, I do agree with them that that is exactly what a name change implies.
I've spent a lot of time
A small part of me, however, does kind of like the idea of having the same last name as my partner. If I marry my current partner, pretty much nothing will change when we do get married because we will have already lived together for who knows how many years. It would be kind of nice to have some sort of symbolic change to represent our marriage. And it would be kind of nice to have some sort of symbolic, "oh hey world! we're a team!" throughout our lives. If we went this route though, he'd have to change his name too. We would become a team together; it wouldn't just be that I'm jumping on board Team Brett. Ideally, in this situation we would both end up hyphenating our last names, so I would be Shannon Hill-M and he would be Brett Hill-M. Sometimes, I actually think that doing it this way is more progressive, because the idea of a man changing his last name for a woman is even more unheard of then a woman just keeping her own. Additionally, then our names would match our children's, because our children would have Hill-Maiden as their last name regardless of whether or not I keep my maiden name or we both hyphenate them. (Although, honestly, I'm not too worried about this. I went through childhood having a mother whose name was Joanne Hill, then Joanne Maiden Name, then Joanne Step-Father's Name and no one ever got confused over who my mother was).
Another very small part of me wants to somehow incorporate my mother's maiden name into the equation somehow, because I love her and I hate patriarchy.
So, I would love to know, what do you think you will do with your last name when you get married, and why? If you're already married, what did you do with your last name, and why? Was it not important to you to break with the tradition? Or do you have a fun, creative way of disrupting the system that you'd love to share?
