Florida Man Accused of Fraud After Adopting His Wife's Last Name

Recently, a man in Florida was accused of fraud and had his driver's license suspended after he opted to adopt his wife's last name when they got married. 

Isn't that ridiculous?!

Photo of Mr. and Ms. Dinh, Courtesy of Reuters

The man says he followed the same process that a woman would follow to change her last name after she got married, but was later told that that process is "only for women" and that he has to go through a much more time-consuming and expensive process if he wants to legally change his name.

Apparently, only a few states have received the memo that women are not just chattel who are passed from their fathers to their husbands. Only nine states - nine! - have gender neutral marriage name change laws: California, New York, Hawaii, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Oregon, Iowa, Georgia, and North Dakota.

The whole incident makes me even more grateful to be involved with The Last Name Project and reminds us all that our laws, not just our traditions, still reinforce the good ole' patriarchal status quo!

I'd love to hear from men who changed their names when they got married. Did you have go through an alternative route? Did you encounter legal resistance?

[Maia] The Last Name Project

In this series co-hosted by from two to one and The Feminist Mystique, we will be profiling an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry. The goal is to explore how individuals make decisions about their last name, and to highlight the many possibilities. We will be posting profiles periodically and encourage you to stay connected via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  If you would like to participate in this series, email Danielle at danielle [at] fromtwotoone [dot] com or Shannon at hill [dot] shannonp [at] gmail [dot] com.  

The following post is by Maia, a Midwestern transplant to the Bay Area where she is a chiropractic intern by trade (just shy of graduating!), and a modern dancer by passion.  She lives in a treehouse with her partner B (writer of urban half-truths,charlieupsidedown.wordpress.com) and dog Charlie (hiking aficionado, chaser of tennis balls and squirrels).  The non-traditional and varied relationship values of the Bay Area have provided endless food-for-thought about how she defines individualism, feminism, and partnership, and these views are continually evolving.

My last name has always held some frustration for me.  It’s difficult to spell, can be phonetically pronounced more than one way, and no one ever gets it right.  My first name is somewhat unique and seems to give people trouble as well—really, what’s so difficult about it? —So the name change dilemma has always been about aesthetics to me.  As I got older, I got in touch with the independence of keeping my own name, and I admire my father and the family I came from.  (As a side note, I can’t help but wonder; is keeping your father’s name much different than taking your husbands’, from a feminist standpoint?)  I also considered that I will become licensed as a chiropractor and begin a practice before I marry.  The logistics of changing my name later on become increasingly challenging and can pose professional risks after trying to establish myself by one name.

I don’t particularly label myself a feminist, mostly because FEMINIST seems to have taken on an extremist representation in a lot of ways.  I consider myself a strong woman, and I believe in fiercely embracing and supporting concerns close to women and modern female justice.   However, I don’t view keeping my own name as an act of defiance against the system which would take it from me, and I don’t view taking a partners’ as an act of submission to masculine oppression.  My sentiments may be shaped by a distinct early memory of my mom Christmas-gifting my dad her driver’s license in his name after 10 years of marriage.

B and I have been together 5 years, and while not engaged, we have a weightier task on our minds—choosing our own last name.  I like his last name.  It sounds good with my first, it’s German like me, it’s pronounceable and phonetically spelled, it’s right at the beginning of the alphabet and I’m tired of being at the end.  But he relates little to the family of his namesake; his relationship with his father has always been tenuous, and a shift in religious expression has widened the gap with the rest of the family.  At first I felt it was malicious to forego his father’s name, but I had to admit that I wasn’t thrilled about building a family on a name we didn’t value.

When B suggested we take his deceased mother’s maiden name, I liked his purposeful and honoring intent.  It seems like a logical solution, but superstition is holding us back—of a large family, none have survived to carry on the name, and that’s a little foreboding to us.  So we began to make up names, or try out ones we saw on publications or signs.  We have carved a nitch unique to us as a couple, and choosing a name that represents that is inviting.  Some are clever, some are silly, some are basic, some are rooted in reason or logic.  Some, we really like.  But it’s serious business to legally amend your formal designation.  It’s hard to come up with something you like and can live with, that also has value.   Currently, we’re weighing some frontrunners that allude to family but allow us to be original.  This way I can share a name with my children, further my individual identity, and feel no guilt for keeping OR changing my given name.

[Brandi] The Last Name Project

In this series co-hosted by from two to one and The Feminist Mystique, we will be profiling an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry. The goal is to explore how individuals make decisions about their last name, and to highlight the many possibilities. We will be posting profiles periodically and encourage you to stay connected via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  If you would like to participate in this series, email Danielle at danielle [at] fromtwotoone [dot] com or Shannon at hill [dot] shannonp [at] gmail [dot] com.  

The following post is by Brandi, a lawyer in Denver who spends very little time actually lawyering. She can usually be found working for free at a nonprofit, hiking up mountains, or bossing her husband around because he made the mistake of asking her for help with his business one time. 

This post originally appeared on the Curvy Girl Guide. It has been re-posted with permission.


I had the idea of how I wanted an ideal marriage to go long before I ever conceded that I myself might get married one day. I didn’t want kids, and on most days still don’t. I wanted a husband who took as much responsibility for the house as I did. I never would tolerate being called “woman,” and I for sure would never change my last name.

So when I met a man who loved the fact that I was strong-willed and progressive, I scooped him up fast and we got married earlier than anyone (us included) would ever have imagined.

From the start, I made it abundantly clear that I would not take his name. First off, I don’t love his last name for me. I love it on him as it suits him and is indicative of his extremely Irish heritage, but it’s just not a great name for me. For me to give up my last name, a name I adore, a name that suits me and has in a weird way been a sort of identity to me, outside of being a mere moniker, I would have to love how his name sounds with mine, and frankly, I don’t. Second, my name is extremely important to me. I grew up in a tight family. Our name has always been a badge of pride and I didn’t intend to give it up for a name I had very little connection to. Lastly, my husband is so supportive and has always made it clear that he was happy with whatever name I chose to have.

It’s not that I don’t respect every woman’s choice to do what she will with her name once she is married, but for me it was a no-brainer. I had no intention of becoming my husband’s “property.” (Cue the eye-rolls because I know, it’s so clichéd feminist and hippy-liberal.) It’s also just how I feel about it.

Plus, having different names means that in the areas that are important to us we can stand on our own. I am published academically under my maiden name and can write online without implicating him. He has built a successful career and presence through his own name that is not easily traced to me. We come together through our relationship and commitment, which are much deeper than eight letters can ever describe.

Of course, it hasn’t always been easy. Since we did marry so young I got the side-eye many a time when people realized I didn’t change my name. Once my husband was sick and called his doctor from work for a prescription. I went to pick it up for him and the nurse almost would not give it to me as I didn’t have the same last name as my husband, never mind that we had the same address on our ID cards. We’ve had more than one landlord ask that just one of us go on the lease because boyfriends and girlfriends often break up causing a lot of issues, and trying to do anything with a bill in just one of our names is usually a headache. Some people even refuse to acknowledge that I didn’t change my name and have continually called me by my husband’s name.

Minor annoyances aside, I can’t imagine being called anything else, and I think my husband would find it funny for me to share his name. There was a time where we thought we would both change our last names to something new but decided, paperwork in hand on the way to the courthouse, that it wasn’t in the cards for us, we were both so attached to our given names. In the end, we each have the name we have chosen to have and we feel really good about those decisions. It’s certainly not the choice most make but I recently came across a website that shares the stories of those who for one reason or another stray from tradition when it comes to married names. I love reading it and seeing a whole array of perspectives on what is really in a name. What’s in my name is family and history and loyalty and understanding.

So I’m really curious, did/will you change your last name or not? Can you ever see yourself doing it differently?

[Molly] The Last Name Project

In this new series co-hosted by from two to one and The Feminist Mystique, we will be profiling an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry. The goal is to explore how individuals make decisions about their last name, and to highlight the many possibilities. We will be posting profiles periodically and encourage you to stay connected via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  If you would like to participate in this series, email Danielle at danielle [at] fromtwotoone [dot] com or Shannon at hill [dot] shannonp [at] gmail [dot] com.

  

The following post is from Molly Westerman, a parent, scholar, radical, feminist, educator, and birth nerd. She writes at firsttheegg.com, a feminist resource on pregnancy, birth, and parenting. 

When I was twenty-one, I met this guy and was pretty smitten. On a road trip two months later, he and I discussed everything under the sun, including the question of Last Names When One Marries Someone. Although we were already madly in love, we kept the conversation hypothetical. But it wasn’t much of a discussion: there was no way in hell, we agreed, that we or anyone who happened to be marrying either of us would be changing any surnames, thank you very much.

Eric and I shared this assumption. But Eric was, and is, more emphatic about the whole thing. He’s a historian, after all, and the historical resonance of the femme covert, of marriage as the transfer of not just a woman’s property but of a woman as property, of her loss of her legal standing and identity along with her original name … well, all that sits heavily with him. With me, too, but more absolutely with him.

Intellectually and politically, we are both suspicious of the rhetoric of free choice and interested in the structural and institutional forces that constrain people’s choices. It’s hard not to notice that the vast majority of hetero couples who want ‘a family name’ choose the male partner’s surname. Sometimes specific factors of personal history or values make that the best option; sometimes the couple outright acknowledges not wanting to swim upstream; but often, friends making this choice insisted that they just coincidentally preferred the man’s name. This obliviousness to the historical and cultural pressures at play in one’s decision, to the larger statistical realities in which this individual drama plays out, worries me.

On top of all that, I’m just knee-jerk sketched out by group identity. I know many people really want to get married and have kids and be “The Whomevers,” but I am not one of those people. To me, it feels like a slippery slope from “introducing, for the first time, Mr. and Mrs. Whomever” to those scary posed photos where every family member is wearing matching turtlenecks and jeans. I wasn’t in a sorority, I don’t belong to a church, I will never root for a sports team, and I just cannot co-create The Whomevers.

So when we got married a couple years later, we kept our names. At the time, most of our friends were graduate students in the humanities; they saw our decision as normal. Now we live in Minnesota, where people are too polite to say anything even if they think it’s weird.

Two years after the wedding, my enormously pregnant body put the whole surname situation back in the spotlight. We had to figure out not only first and middle names but also last ones. Hyphenating our particular names would be unwieldy and ugly (trust me). I was unwilling to have a family in which everyone but one parent shares a name: and which name would that be, anyway? We decided to go with an entirely different surname for our children: one that echoes both our names’ German origins and reminds us of a beloved family member.

Beyond feeling comfortable for our family, our unusual name situation has benefited me in an unexpected way. A few years ago, in the midst of a major career-change-slash-existential-crisis, I dropped my anonymity and started blogging under my full name. This openness has meant a great deal to me and would have been impossible if we all shared a family name. Because my name is just mine, I can play with the lines of my own privacy without clearly identifying the other main characters in my life.

[Abby] The Last Name Project

In this new series co-hosted by from two to one and The Feminist Mystique, we will be profiling an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry. The goal is to explore how individuals make decisions about their last name, and to highlight the many possibilities. We will be posting profiles periodically and encourage you to stay connected via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  If you would like to participate in this series, email Danielle at danielle [at] fromtwotoone [dot] com or Shannon at hill [dot] shannonp [at] gmail [dot] com. 

The following post is from Abby, who lives in Los Angeles with her programmer husband, toddler daughter, and rather haughty cat.  She loves tacos, stripes, and chronicling her latest obsessions at http://officiallyobsessed.net

I’m Abby, and my husband is Evan.  We were both raised by liberal, progressive (but not activist) families with mothers and fathers who both worked full-time.  While I don’t think either of us knew the word “feminist” as children, I can guarantee that we both grew up thinking of equal rights between men and women as a given societal ideal, not a particularly radical idea.

When we first started dating in college, I was already identifying myself as a feminist based on what I was learning in my Communication classes.  Evan studied Computer Science, but when we’d talk about what I was learning, we quickly bonded over sharing the same ideas.  Remember how exciting it can be the first time you uncover completely new ideas?  I think the only thing more exhilarating is when you learn that your favorite person shares your perspective!

Over the next few years, we also realized that our relationship didn’t have to cleave to traditional notions of coupledom, and that whatever we chose to pursue as a couple was our choice alone.  Move in together?  Our choice.  Combine our finances?  Our choice.  Separate for six months?  Our choice.  Not every decision was easy, but when we decided to get married, after being together for 4.5 years, we knew that neither of us wanted to take each other’s surname.  

Sometimes, this is what perplexes people the most: why wouldn’t I want to take his?  (I’m pretty certain Evan doesn’t get asked the reverse.)  I’ve never stated my true feelings in response, but I will here: while I feel it’s an intensely personal decision, I also think that it’s patently unfair that I’m expected to take Evan’s name when every other aspect of our lives and relationship are thought to be generally equal.  There are plenty of other good reasons out there, but there’s mine.

At the same time, I’ve always loved the symbolism of words, and Evan loves naming things.  We both recognized this as an opportunity to do something new and unique to us that would signify the start of our family.  To me, marriage is the public declaration that this person, who previously was my dearest love, is now that and my family.  So we decided that, in lieu of us taking the other’s name, a new name would be the best path for us.  Because our surnames didn’t sound good combined, we felt free to go with something completely new.

We had a lot of fun over the next year or so trying out different last names before landing on Phoenix.  The name’s advantages: the symbolism with regards to our start as a new family, the fact that the name was neither Asian (my culture) nor European (Evan’s), and how nice it sounded with our first names.   We’d whisper our new names and break out into huge smiles – a sure sign that we were making the right decision for us!

When we decided to start trying to have a baby a few years ago, we knew that part of this was easier for us than if, for example, we had each kept our surnames. Our girl Zoe has our last name, and my only (very light) concern is if she grows up hating her name, she only has us to blame, as we personally chose all of it!

We still come across reminders that our choice is atypical, like when Evan explains that he has a “maiden name.” But for the most part, after six years of marriage, our names now seem pretty normal to us… just as they should be.

[Melany] The Last Name Project

In this new series co-hosted by from two to one and The Feminist Mystique, we will be profiling an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry. The goal is to explore how individuals make decisions about their last name, and to highlight the many possibilities. We will be posting profiles periodically and encourage you to stay connected via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  If you would like to participate in this series, email Danielle at danielle [at] fromtwotoone [dot] com or Shannon at hill [dot] shannonp [at] gmail [dot] com.  

The following post is from Melany, a high school history teacher living in California. 

I have been married for just over a year and we are currently raising two feline children, but plan to start a family of human children within the next ten years. I identify myself as a feminist, which my husband constantly mocks me for, and I come from a family filled with divorces.

I often imagined as a young girl that I would get married – and what I thought about the most was not the wedding details or who the man would be, but instead what my last name would change to. Growing up I was very distant from my father, and from his family for the most part. He had been an alcoholic since he was a teenager, and I became an angry teenager who was bitter that he had abandoned me. I could not wait until I was an adult who could find a man to love me the way my father never did and take my husband’s new name in place of my father’s.

This was my mindset when I became an engaged to the man who is now my husband. I had every intention of ditching my dad’s last name as soon as I could and taking the last name of the love of my life. I of course gave my dad the conciliatory call to tell him I was engaged, but I had no intentions of having him walk me down the aisle, and quite frankly, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to invite him to the wedding given the comments he made while he was drunk at many other big family events in the past.

And then everything changed. Not overnight, but my dad began go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings
completely on his own accord for the first time in his life. He had been in treatment many times in the past, but it was always as a result of a threatened divorce or as a result of a court order. He told me that it was my engagement that inspired him. He said he realized that I was about to be married, and he had missed my whole life up until that point. He told me he wanted to get healthy to be there for when we had his first grandkids. He also began reaching out to me more, and apologized to me for the first time in his life for what he had done to me and to our relationship with each other as a result of his drinking. He met my fiancé, and for the first time, actually remembered meeting him afterwards.

We began talking more on the phone, and I decided that I would invite him to the wedding, but I would still have my mom, and not him, walk me down the aisle. My one year of engagement became a pivotal point in my life – I was reconnecting with the man I wanted to do away with so badly while at the same time I was getting ready to make the biggest commitment of my life my new man.

My husband and I talked about the last name change. He was fine if I kept my “old name,” but was not open to creating a new name together or taking my name. While I have feminist tendencies, this was perfectly fine with me as taking my husband’s name matched my original childhood plans. We plan on having children, and I did not want them to have a hyphenated name that combined their parents’ original last names, and I wanted to have the same last name as my children. Based on everything up to this point, the big decisions were made– my dad would be invited to the wedding, but my mom would walk me down the aisle, and I would take my husband’s name.

And then everything changed. And this time, it was overnight. My dad was taken to the hospital by an
ambulance about a month before our wedding. He was conscious, but in a lot of pain, and the doctors didn’t know exactly what was wrong with him. He was put in the Intensive Care Unit and over the next three weeks he was transferred in and out of ICU, went in and out of consciousness, and eventually was in a coma and due to an internal problem, complications from surgery, and a lifelong of drinking. He had organ failure and the doctors told me that if he did wake up that he would most likely have permanent brain damage. The hospital staff suggested that we take him off of life support – and since he wasn’t married at the time and I was the oldest child, it was my call on whether to take him off of life support or keep hooked up to machines fighting for a shell of his old life. I talked to one of his brother’s that had been showing up a lot at the hospital, my mom, and my husband, but ultimately it was my decision. My dad’s brother that had been there for the duration of his time in the hospital suggested I wait until after the wedding to decide so that I didn’t have to plan a wedding and a funeral at the same time, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around making my dad wait to die so that I could start my new life. About a week before the wedding, I made the decision to let my dad go and began making arrangements for his cremation and funeral while managing my final bridal gown fitting, hair and make up tests, rehearsal and dinner, and all of the other things that go along with planning your own small wedding. When we went in to get our marriage certificate a few days after my dad’s death I decided that I would keep my original last name and add my husband’s last name. No hyphen, no middle name change, just a new addition to the end. As a teacher with a long last name, most of my students just call me by the first part – my original last name. It always makes me feel more connected with my dad and remember our past. Losing my dad forced me to accept our past relationship as it was, and I am now very glad to have kept that whole part of my identity rather than abandoning it for a false reality of a new start at life.

Spotted: The Last Name Project in Huffington Post Weddings!

Danielle and I are very excited that The Last Name Project was featured in Huff Post Weddings! Click here to read the article.

And if you'd like to submit a story to The Last Name Project, please do email Danielle or me!

[Sally] The Last Name Project

In this new series co-hosted by from two to one and The Feminist Mystique, we will be profiling an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry. The goal is to explore how individuals make decisions about their last name, and to highlight the many possibilities. We will be posting profiles periodically and encourage you to stay connected via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  If you would like to participate in this series, email Danielle at danielle [at] fromtwotoone [dot] com or Shannon at hill [dot] shannonp [at] gmail [dot] com. 

The following post is from Sally. 

I identify as a feminist, my husband and I have been married for 19 happy years, we have two kids (who have my surname as a second middle name and his last name).  Only my grandmother raised a question as to why I wasn't taking his name when we got married, but no one else really made much of it.

My husband's last name is that of an infamous Nazi official. No kidding. Fortunately, his family has no known relationship to this butcher. But the question of this suspected relationship sometimes arises when we meet new Jewish acquaintances. His family is also pretty conservative; mine is progressive, and I identify more with the values that my family espouses. (My mom assumed my father's name when they got married, although she still uses her maiden name as a middle name.) My husband and I are both Ivy League PhDs, and I worked very hard to achieve this educational and professional goal, and I prefer that my published work appear under my own distinct name. Even though I kept my "maiden" name upon getting married, would you believe that we still get wedding invitations from his cousins addressed to "Dr. and Mrs. [my husband's name]"?

[Bruce] The Last Name Project

In this new series co-hosted by from two to one and The Feminist Mystique, we will be profiling an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry. The goal is to explore how individuals make decisions about their last name, and to highlight the many possibilities. We will be posting profiles periodically and encourage you to stay connected via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  If you would like to participate in this series, email Danielle at danielle [at] fromtwotoone [dot] com or Shannon at hill [dot] shannonp [at] gmail [dot] com. 

The following post is from Bruce, who wanted to contribute another anecdote about a husband adopting his wife's last name to The Last Name Project. 

Our naming story is complicated, but ultimately shallow. When we got engaged, my wife and I discussed what name we would take. Our choice of name mattered little as a signifier; we're both Jewish and at the time enjoyed equally Jewish-sounding names. Frankly, I hadn't given it any thought, but as a feminist my fiance naturally had and wanted reasons beyond patriarchal tradition for my name (Aronson) to take preference to hers or to some other name we might mutually agree to. Rather than pick a "winner," she recommended compromizing on a hybridized name. However, her suggestion (Aronfalk), while logical, nonetheless struck me as ungainly -- too much like Amtrak, I told her. I suggested we try "A.Falk," with a silent "A" (bear in mind that this was in the mid-90's, more or less at the dawn of the popular internet, and before such a naming convention had come into wider use).

While apparently whimsical on its face, my suggestion was sincere and entirely pragmatic. By adopting this eclectic homophone of her patronymic, we'd share a simple-sounding name that would appear conventional in written form (as most people would take the "A." for a middle initial), retain whatever advantages were to be had in nearing the top of the alphabet (front-row seating for future children in school?), and have a silly anecdote with which to break the ice at cocktail parties.

She found this approach a bit too unconventional, and so we discussed the possibility of instead using an alternative hybrid, a newly invented name, or hyphenate. To have "Falk" precede anything else seemed awkward to me, as I thought it just too likely to be misheard as a popular expletive, so "FalkAron" and its cognates were out. I was also opposed to hyphenates as unwieldy: I saw them as unnecessarily long and entangling for offspring who might then have to deal with an ever-propagating string of hyphenates upon their respective marriages. In any case (for me) "Bruce Falk" had a nice, pithy ring to it that no invented name seemed to improve upon, so I proposed we would adopt her last name as a family name subject to a few provisos to which she was happy to agree. (This is where the complications arise.)

Since I retained some sentimental attachment to my old name and did not want to risk offending my parents (who might misinterpret my rejection of standard convention as a rejection of them, irrespective of any explanation I might make), my basic proviso was that we should pass "Aronson" along to any prospective children as a middle name (thereby preserving the traditional filial commitment to perpetuate my father's identity). I felt this could be viewed as consistent with cultural practice where one might regard the middle name of "Aronson" as a conventional patronymic (at least in Tolstoy's Russia), and of course practically speaking the decision would immediately resolve the question of what if any middle name to give future kids. I am a proponent of middle names, especially unfashionable ones; they serve to further distinguish otherwise eponymous individuals who share common first and last names. I saw no need for us to have more than three names (most demographic forms have no field for unhyphenated extras), so adopting a new middle name would mean jettisoning our old middle names... but then, we weren't using them anyway and a legal name change came gratis with our marriage license.

Actually, I'd always liked my middle name and hated to see it go to waste. Had I kept it, it would never have been used in my lifetime as Jewish superstition renders it taboo to name children after living people. My fiance's middle name meant nothing to her, so we handled the matter like a professional sports league. We weren't going to have more than two children (we thought), so our first-born son or second-born daughter would get the middle name I was giving up. As it turned out, our first child was a girl, but we each liked the sound of my old middle name so much, we gave it to her anyway.  I'll spare you the research and lengthy discussion that went into naming our second child (a boy), but suffice it to say that we've never had cause to regret any of our naming decisions.

While I recognize that it's easy to get caught up in conventions and identity baggage, I strongly doubt that posterity really cares. My prime mover has been a love of language. I'd love to see someone go by "Skender Luljaraj, Space Pirate," if only to guarantee the attention of any restaurant maitre-d. Otherwise, what's in a name?

[Ginny] The Last Name Project

In this new series co-hosted by from two to one and The Feminist Mystique,we will be profiling an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry. The goal is to explore how individuals make decisions about their last name, and to highlight the many possibilities. We will be posting profiles periodically and encourage you to stay connected via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  If you would like to participate in this series, email Danielle at danielle [at] fromtwotoone [dot] com or Shannon at hill [dot] shannonp [at] gmail [dot] com.   

The following post is from Ginny, a novelist and educator currently working on a master's of education in human sexuality. She, her husband, and several others blog about relationships, sexuality, atheism, and skepticism at http://polyskeptic.com.

My last name is Brown, and my husband's is McGonigal. I grew up assuming that I would take my husband's name when I married, and not minding the idea much... although I like the overall sound of my name, Brown is so common as to be boring. However, I also grew up assuming I'd always adhere to the mildly patriarchal values I was taught, and that I'd be married in my early 20s rather than my early 30s.

My husband and I are unconventional and egalitarian in a number of ways. It's likely that he will be the one to stay home with any children we have. We are also polyamorous, which means that we are open to developing loving relationships with other people, always with full disclosure, lots of discussion, and attention to each others' needs before anything else. Largely because of this, because there's the possibility that we may want to add other adults to our family someday, and because we're both in our 30s and very used to our own names, we decided to keep our names unchanged. We considered adding each others' names as second middle names, and we may someday do that if motivated, but at this time the paperwork doesn't seem worth it.

Following the example of some friends of ours, we have a portmanteau name that we use in informal social contexts. So we're still able to say "the McBrownigals wish you a merry Christmas," even though it's not anyone's legal name. It's a solution we're quite happy with... we considered actually changing our name to McBrownigal, but I felt it sounded a bit silly for publishing papers under.

Our plan for any children we have is to give them both our names, one as the last name and one as a second middle name. Which order we use will depend on how each name sounds with the first names we like, and (if we have a son) how much we want to avoid upsetting my father-in-law, who feels strongly about passing down his name.

[T.S.] The Last Name Project

In this new series co-hosted by from two to one and The Feminist Mystique,we will be profiling an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry. The goal is to explore how individuals make decisions about their last name, and to highlight the many possibilities. We will be posting profiles periodically and encourage you to stay connected via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  If you would like to participate in this series, email Danielle at danielle [at] fromtwotoone [dot] com or Shannon at hill [dot] shannonp [at] gmail [dot] com.   

The following post is from T. S., who lives in India and blogs over at Lazy Scribbles.

I didn't change my surname after marriage. I have always viewed my name as an intrinsic part of my identity. It didn't seem fair to me that I got my fathers surname. If I could go back in time, I would have preferred to take my mothers surname, or even better, no surname at all. However, the point was that I'd carried around my surname for more than a decade, before I started thinking about it in my teens. By then it was a part of me, it was who I was, who I identified as, in a million places, in my school, my bank, my mails, my whole being as a person, as a citizen. I didn't want to change it or drop it, even to match my own feminist world view. So, the whole idea of changing it upon marriage, had always seemed incomprehensible to me. I was brought up in a fairly nonconformist household, and the importance of following tradition, for the its own sake, was always very low in the general scheme of things at home. A lot of things which are explained only on the basis of tradition, or justifications of ancient social systems, likewise seemed quite incomprehensible to me. I felt that a lot of these questions I was grappling with, perhaps made sense in a patriarchal agrarian society. The idea of being 'given away' in marriage, becoming part of a different, pre-existing family unit/dynasty , changing the surname to fit with it, and further it. In my world as a city dweller in nuclear family units, with frequently changing jobs in the service industry, it didn't make any sense at all. While we were dating, my partner thought I'd perhaps get over my 'extremist' stand eventually. He didn't really share my feminist views. When I didn't get over them even after many years, he didn't seem to happy about it, but came around to living with it. Subsequently, not too many people bothered to worry me about why I hadn't changed my surname. Maybe they knew by then from my various choices, how little I really bothered with customs, and how much I identified as a feminist. Maybe most people are really a lot less bothered about us than we think. Some people do ask questions about how such decisions would work for the next generation. In theory, I'd prefer that they take the primary caregiver's surname. In practice, to each their own!

[Katelyn] The Last Name Project

In this new series co-hosted by from two to one and The Feminist Mystique, we will be profiling an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry. The goal is to explore how individuals make decisions about their last name, and to highlight the many possibilities. We will be posting profiles periodically and encourage you to stay connected via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  If you would like to participate in this series, email Danielle at danielle [at] fromtwotoone [dot] com or Shannon at hill [dot] shannonp [at] gmail [dot] com.   

The following post is from Katelyn, a theologian, ethicist, writer, and FEMINIST. She blogs about theology, gender, sexuality, and women's issues over at Celestial Fig Trees (and sometimes writes about cooking, too). 

Although I am not married, I have spent years thinking about whether I am going to keep my name when I do get married. For most of my life, aesthetic has been the primary deciding point for me; does the name flow off the tongue appropriately? I remember that when I was about five years old, I just knew that I was going to marry my best friend Joshua one day. I also remember deciding that—since he was of Polish descent, and his name was much too difficult to spell—he was going to have to take my name if I would agree to the marriage at all. A practical decision, perhaps, had I not eventually learned how to spell his name (really, Polish spelling isn't that hard!).

Of course, my friendship with Joshua didn't last after my family moved away, but the notion of keeping a practical name stuck with me. Ease of spelling grew less important, since I have the privilege of a mother with two difficult to spell names (Ouida Juanette), and an aunt whose name features a letter not in the English character set (Aïda). It was not until I got together with my current boyfriend, Marc, that I really started considering the possibility of keeping my name. I was not looking forward to having an alliterative name (since his last name is Kashiwagi), but that wasn't what decided things for me. Instead, it was meeting his mother, an early-second-wave feminist who kept her last name when she got married. Her reasoning behind keeping her own name was that since she had been published and received several degrees in her name, it made no sense to change it because of custom. She also handles having a different name from her husband and son with grace. I admire her strength of character; after marrying Marc's father the two of them immediately moved to Saudi Arabia where she faced the difficulties of being a feminist in a country with a history of oppression of women.

The practical points she made about keeping a name that had been linked to her in published work (an important consideration for me as a sometime-published writer) resonated with me, and reminded me about my own beliefs about names. I believe that my family names are a part of who I am, and changing my name would remove a certain part of my identity. I want to preserve my family heritage, and I claim my grandmothers' family names with as much pride as my grandfathers'.

Around the same time that I first met Marc's mother, I took a class in Spanish culture, and learned that the Spanish have an interesting approach to naming, and one that I wish the United States legal system would honor. In Spanish culture, each person has two last names: their father's family name and their mother's family name. Upon marriage, a woman does not change her name, and she does not take on a part of her husband's name. Instead, their marriage is recognized in the names of their children, who take their father's family name and their mother's family name. If my family used this system, my name would not be Katelyn Celeste Willis, but it would be Katelyn Celeste Willis Bales, and my mother's name would be Ouida Juanette Bales Riddick, and my father's name Gerald Kenneth Willis Barden. My children, were I to have any with my current boyfriend, would take the last names Kashiwagi Willis, not hyphenated.

What I like about the Spanish system is its elegance; it preserves the matrilineal heritage while allowing women to keep their own names. It solves the problem of trying to decide which name the children should take. And it would make researching family trees so much easier! In an ideal world, my family would use this system of naming. Feminism, to me, is about cherishing one's identity and having the right to be who you are. How can you do that without honoring and acknowledging all of your names?

Role/Reboot

Exciting news! Role/Reboot, an online magazine that explores culture and gender roles, will be posting some of their favorite posts from The Last Name Project on their site. You can see their first repost here.

[Bridget] The Last Name Project

In this new series co-hosted by from two to one and The Feminist Mystique, we will be profiling an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry. The goal is to explore how individuals make decisions about their last name, and to highlight the many possibilities. We will be posting profiles periodically and encourage you to stay connected via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  If you would like to participate in this series, email Danielle at danielle [at] fromtwotoone [dot] com or Shannon at hill [dot] shannonp [at] gmail [dot] com.  

The following post is by Bridget, a writer, theater artist, and massage therapist. She lives in Louisiana with her husband David and their son, Anton. She blogs about veganism, feminism, books, motherhood and the artistic life at http://spaceshipnola.blogspot.com/. 

In my last semester of college, I began to go by my first and middle name only (Bridget Erin) for all of my artistic endeavors.  This idea came from my aunt, who suggested I use Bridget Erin as a “stage name” that would never need to be changed, even if I got married and changed my official last name.   It appealed to me originally because it was a time of great personal transformation – I was becoming an adult, graduating from college, moving to a new city, and establishing myself as an artist. Over the years, I began to see it also as a way to opt out of the patriarchal baggage of last names altogether.  It felt freeing – even if the feminist implications of my chosen name were only apparent to me.  On paper, nothing changed.  But over the years, the majority of people in my life came to know me as Bridget Erin.  Many of them assume  Erin is my last name. 

I didn’t change my name immediately after marrying my husband.  It was a busy time – I gave birth to our son just one month after our wedding!   I originally planned to change my last name to his, since our son had his last name, and because I was still going by Bridget Erin in my artistic life and consequently decided I wasn’t too attached to my “official” last name.  But during this time I read a long an interesting discussion on the blog Feministe about women changing their last names, and I began to have second thoughts.

 My husband did not have strong feelings on the matter.  His mother kept her original name for many, many years, changing it to his father’s name only very recently.  Incidentally, my husband grew up in the USSR and changed his first name to David after moving to the U.S. 

In the end, I decided to hyphenate.  It felt like a way to embrace both my origins and my new family.  This makes my last name long, unwieldy, and an odd combination of Irish and Jewish.  I like it.  But to my friends, I’m still Bridget Erin.

[Antara] The Last Name Project

In this new series co-hosted by from two to one and The Feminist Mystique, we will be profiling an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry. The goal is to explore how individuals make decisions about their last name, and to highlight the many possibilities. We will be posting profiles periodically and encourage you to stay connected via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  If you would like to participate in this series, email Danielle at danielle [at] fromtwotoone [dot] com or Shannon at hill [dot] shannonp [at] gmail [dot] com.  

The following post is by Antara, who is from India.

Although India itself is still a fairly socially conservative country, I was brought up in a particularly progressive family. Therefore, when I was growing up, I never thought about whether keeping my last name could be a matter of choice  – it seemed to be such an obvious fact of life that the idea that I could do something differently never even occurred to me.

When I got married, it was to an American with a last name that was not exactly linguistically compatible with my first name. But since I never consciously evaluated my options on this front, this was not a factor in my “decision”.

At that time, I worked with a set of fairly conservative colleagues who kept asking me whether I was trying to be a rebel by refusing to take my husband’s last name. This was shocking to me, not only because I never felt that I was making any sort of decision (let alone a rebellious one) but because even if I were to consciously make such a decision, I would be quite far from being a pioneering trail-blazer on this issue. 

Constant interrogation from various people and several people’s (often innocent) attempts to force my husband’s last name on me in holiday cards and wedding invites left me frustrated and forced me to think about why keeping my last name was such an easy and obvious choice.

I realized that there were two primary reasons: first, my last name gives me a sense of identity. It is the only last name that I have ever had and it is the name that forms the basis of all my memories. I cannot imagine myself with a different last name. But even more importantly, I would never take any man’s last name simply because the tradition represents an asymmetry that is rooted in sexism and I will not be a part of that.

When my husband and I had our first child, we gave him a hyphenated last name that contained both our last names. This was very much a conscious decision and we receive a lot of patronizing questions about it. Yes, we understand that our child’s last name will not be the most common last name in his school. Sure, it may not roll off everyone’s tongue so easily. And if and when our six-month old child eventually has his own child with a partner who also has a double-barreled name, they can make their own decision about what their child’s last name should be (but we thank you for your extremely forward-looking concerns). In the meantime, we realize that there may well be days when he gets a little annoyed with his complicated last name. But we hope that when he grows up, he will think its kind of cool that he carries the names of both his parents. And if he does not, he always has the choice to change his last name. It is a free country after all.

[A] The Last Name Project

In this new series co-hosted by from two to one and The Feminist Mystique, we will be profiling an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry. The goal is to explore how individuals make decisions about their last name, and to highlight the many possibilities. We will be posting profiles periodically and encourage you to stay connected via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  If you would like to participate in this series, email Danielle at danielle [at] fromtwotoone [dot] com or Shannon at hill [dot] shannonp [at] gmail [dot] com. 

The following post is from A, who lives in the USA.

I married at the end of 2008, but didn’t get around to changing my surname until the following February. I did a lot of waffling about my last name, but in the end I felt confident with my choice to change it. My husband didn’t participate in my decision—he just let me make my choice. (Although he now thinks that it would have been cool to pick a new name for ourselves if we had thought about it at the time!) I was also very lucky that my career had no bearing on my choice; I was just starting out and there was never any pressure about what to call myself after I was married.

My primary reason for wanting to change my last name upon marriage stems from my family situation:  my father is a misogynist and has been since I can remember. All he ever wanted was a son; instead he got 4 daughters. As a kid I had heard him bemoan his status as “the last Doe*” because he was an only son who had no sons of his own; it was like we girls weren’t “Doe*” enough to continue the legacy or the name because we weren’t boys, no matter how smart or wonderful or successful we were in our own rights. Although I toyed with the idea of hyphenation (ditching my “tag” of 23 years wasn’t entirely painless, regardless of my strong motivations for wanting to change it), I ultimately changed my last name completely because I wanted to be free of that patriarchal connection to my father—a connection to which I never consented in the first place, since his name had been assigned to me at birth. I didn’t want to share a last name with a bitter man who frankly doesn’t deserve his wonderful daughters. I don’t think that I would have come to my conclusion if I had not discovered feminism and my passion for women’s equality; my feminism helped me to confront the ugly truth about my father’s character and I was able to make a decision that was right for me. I chose to take the last name of my husband’s family in the end; they had never shown me anything but kindness and acceptance and love and legally taking the last name of people I had come to love in return felt…right.

*Name changed for the sake of anonymity

[M] The Last Name Project

In this new series co-hosted by from two to one and The Feminist Mystique, we will be profiling an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry. The goal is to explore how individuals make decisions about their last name, and to highlight the many possibilities. We will be posting profiles periodically and encourage you to stay connected via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  If you would like to participate in this series, email Danielle at danielle [at] fromtwotoone [dot] com or Shannon at hill [dot] shannonp [at] gmail [dot] com.  

The following post is from M, who teaches at a medium sized university in the Midwest but spent the last three months in Kenya conducting research. 

The decision to change our last names originated with my (male) partner, who proffered the crazy idea to make up a new name.  This suggestion proceeded from a conversation with his former partner about whether he was willing to change his name if they married. 

At first I regarded this scheme with dismay; I had always planned to keep my last name, and this proposition sounded slightly off-center. But the idea of an equally shared sacrifice—and changing your name is essentially a sacrifice, of time, effort, and parts of your identity— seemed like a good way to commemorate our legal union.

We have a common ethnic background, so we decided to pick a name from the Irish language.  Then we started talking about meaning; as academics in the humanities, we focus on words, and translation can be capricious.  He describes the process happening with a bottle of wine and a Gaelic Irish dictionary, and that is almost accurate.  We eventually found a name that alluded to both of our unmarried surnames and to our journeys toward each other, including the collective journey of our immigrant forebears; it means seaborne.

Once we had selected a name, we explained our choice to our parents.  A’s mother responded by spluttering “you cannot do that,” essentially protesting her own lack of choice in an earlier time, and my father pronounced us “foolish and irresponsible,” but we ignored their whimpers of tradition.  To allay possible confusion, our wedding program contained a paragraph explaining the choice to choose a new name and the name itself.

Others’ confusion about our choice never really surfaced, but legal difficulties did.  Legally changing your name (unless you are a woman taking a husband’s name upon marriage) proved more difficult than we imagined.  Instead of writing the new name on the marriage certificate as brides could if taking a man’s surname, we were forced to use the court system. First one petitions the court, then makes a public announcement of the change by purchasing an advertisement in a local newspaper, which publishes nothing else, then swears in front of a judge that the name change is not an attempt to escape outstanding debt.  The judge in our case made me repeat myself because I was not loud enough the first time.   Even A was schooled not to lean on the judges’ desk during that short interaction.

One unexpected way this choice has been beneficial is my communications with students.  Since my partner and I work in the same academic department, students often know we are a couple because we share the name.  I usually find a way to reveal the name’s origins with my classes at some point, if only to protest their (unspoken) assumption that I took my husband’s name.  The young people then have at least one example of a non-sexist, egalitarian way to address the name change question when they arrive at their own decision.

[Cindy] The Last Name Project

In this new series co-hosted by from two to one and The Feminist Mystique, we will be profiling an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry. The goal is to explore how individuals make decisions about their last name, and to highlight the many possibilities. We will be posting profiles periodically and encourage you to stay connected via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  If you would like to participate in this series, email Danielle at danielle [at] fromtwotoone [dot] com or Shannon at hill [dot] shannonp [at] gmail [dot] com.  

The following post is from Cindy, a health economist who lives in Toronto with her wife and daughter. 

I grew up in a family where all the women changed their names at marriage (for some this meant changing it multiple times). My mother changed her name when she married my father and changed it back when they divorced. In my early 20s, I dated someone who was very traditional, and who repeatedly commented about how his stepmother was not a true [insert his last name] because she had not changed her name to his father’s at marriage.  I thought that was a bit harsh, but also wasn’t yet sure whether I would change my own name at marriage and I certainly wasn’t sure that I wanted to draw a line in the sand over the issue.  Later, as I read more feminist literature, I thought about how a person’s name is attached to her identity and about the inequity of women commonly going through the many bureaucratic, social, and professional steps it takes to re-establish an identity upon marrying while men almost never did.  

In my late 20s, I completed my PhD and had by then observed several of my female classmates going through the process of re-establishing their identities after publishing in their own names and then beginning to publish and speak in their married names.  Friends who worked at large companies would talk about mass emails they received at work announcing a name change for a female colleague; it seemed particularly unfair that women who changed their names in some ways waived their right to privacy with that decision, as they were made to announce both good and bad personal news such as marriages and divorces that they might otherwise like to keep private.

Several college friends changed their names at marriage during this time in my life. Some changed their names because of a love of tradition.  Others changed their names because (like me) they were not close to their father or because (like me) they wanted to have the same name as future children; during this time not even one male friend changed his name at marriage because of these reasons despite many, if not all, of my male friends falling into one of these two categories.  Some friends who came from – or married into – traditional families changed their names due to not wanting to explain or justify their decision hundreds of times over.  I found myself at times especially frustrated by these friends, whose decision not to fight the battle in their own lives only reinforced the status quo, thereby making it that much more difficult for other women to choose not to change their names.  I saw this battle personified in friends who did not change their names and then spent their supply of patience trying to get their own friends/families/in-laws to acknowledge that they had NOT changed their names as the mail poured in to Mr. and Mrs. His Name.

My partners since the one in my early 20s have been strong feminists. By the time I married, there was no discussion to have: I would not change my name.  I also felt strongly that I wouldn’t want the person I married to change their name.  Because I ended up marrying a woman, our decision to keep our names raised fewer eyebrows and demanded less explanation than I believe would have been the case if I had married a man; there was no historical precedent for us to follow or reject. The discussions we did have were about how to incorporate each of our names into our children’s names.  Our first child has my last name as a middle name and my wife’s last name as her last name; our second child will have the reverse.  Our names are a part of who we are and now they are a part of who our children are. Happily, no one had to re-establish an identity to achieve this.

[Stephanie] The Last Name Project

In this new series co-hosted by from two to one and The Feminist Mystique, we will be profiling an array of individuals and couples about their last name decisions upon marriage or what they expect to choose if they marry. The goal is to explore how individuals make decisions about their last name, and to highlight the many possibilities. We will be posting profiles periodically and encourage you to stay connected via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  If you would like to participate in this series, email Danielle at danielle [at] fromtwotoone [dot] com or Shannon at hill [dot] shannonp [at] gmail [dot] com. 

The following post is from Stephanie, who is getting married April 27, 2013. 

As my partner and I started to talk more seriously about getting engaged and, more specifically, when to get engaged, I knew I had to make a decision about the whole last name thing.

I am definitely a feminist, and I knew deep down that I really didn’t want to change my last name. There’s lots of reasons - it’s mine, I have a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in that name, my career has started with that name, I view it as a connection to my paternal grandmother (I never knew my grandfather), etc. My partner was understanding and although perhaps a little disappointed, not really surprised either. But I had this nagging feeling that I should just change it and move on.

Why?

Like it or not, names denote families in the US. And knowing that we want to have kids and that those kids will need a last name is really where my hang-up was. Do we hyphenate? Do we give one his last name and one my last name? Do we give them both just one of our names? I don’t like any of those options. And while my partner and I discussed him taking my name or creating a new one, neither of those options - along with me changing my last name - felt right for us. So we have two last names, and have to figure out what to do about our kids.

I agonized about this. Hyphenating seems to make sense, but I kept thinking “what if they want to marry someone with a hyphenated last name when they get older?! Then they’d have four names to deal with!” This kind of thinking can go on and on and on. Finally, I realized something: too bad. I am not going to feel guilty about not changing my name, and I trust my kids will be smart enough to figure it out. And I know I made the right decision.