Mrs. Feminist

Ninety percent of married women choose to take their husband's name. But don't call them traditional.

By Lynn Harris

Oct 16, 2003 |

Lynn Harris-Adelson

Lynn Harris Adelson

Lynn Adelson

Rabbi and Mrs. Adelson

Rabbi and Mrs. Harris-Adelson

Lynn Harris and David Adelson

Lynn and David Hadelson

Lynn and David Harrelson

Lynn Duchovny

I digress. The point is, my recent doodles show that when I get married in a few weeks, my name and I will have many options. And as a longtime, passionate, dedicated feminist, I intend to take my husband's name.

OK, maybe "tack on" my husband's name is more accurate. I'm going to keep my long-used byline (in the perhaps vain hope that someday that damn E. Lynn Harris will be confused with me), and add "Adelson" after Harris elsewhere. But still. After Nov. 16, if you call me Mrs. Adelson, I will not flinch.

Shocked? Sure, if you live and walk among the bylined and Ivied and later-married, it may feel as if "everyone" -- except Jamie-Lynn Discala, née Sigler -- keeps her name after saying her vows. (Almost half the married women in the Harvard-Radcliffe class of 1990 kept or hyphenated their names.) If you read the New York Times wedding pages, and shut up, you do, the phrase "the bride, who is keeping her name" seems like the norm, unless his name is Rockefeller.

But a woman who keeps her name is anything but the norm. Since the census data does not include names, it's difficult to get exact numbers on how many women have changed theirs. That said, figures from several recent studies suggest that today about 90 percent of marrying women take the husband's name in some form. (About 25 percent, like me, bump maiden to middle.)

Ninety percent? In this day and age? Yes.

According to Harvard economist Claudia Goldin -- who extrapolated from and "normalized" figures derived from Times wedding announcements, Harvard alumni records, and Massachusetts birth records -- the percentage of 30-something college-educated women keeping their names actually dropped from 27 percent to 19 percent between 1990 and 2000. A decrease occurred even among women 35 to 39 with established careers, normally the group most likely to be "keepers."

What's going on?

It's easy to say -- as Goldin and others have -- that more women are taking their husbands' names because we, as a country, are returning to traditional values. It's also easy to toss out that neo-chestnut about how women say they want autonomy, but deep down, they will always need to cleave, Cleaver-style, to a husband. It's also easy to say that this trend is a bad thing.

Too easy, actually. Of course the system is patriarchal. Of course names, and who bestows them, are important; they are linked -- some say are equal -- to identity. And the Lucy Stone League, an organization dedicated to fostering equality in United States naming practices, has a point when it says: "Until naming practices are equal, women will not be considered equal to men in the U.S. In fact, the measure of naming should be used as an index of the real freedom of women and girls in our society."

But when you actually talk to women who change their names, you hear them speak of desires at once more complicated and much simpler -- not to mention more enlightened -- than a retreat to cozy, scary conservatism. Today, a woman's decision to take her husband's name is not necessarily, or merely, "retro." When it comes to such political-slash-personal acts, the stakes have changed, and therefore so have the statements we're making with them. I would argue that we're not losing battles; we're choosing them. We're not retreating; we're showing, subtly, how far we've come.

"I see [the name issue] as a personal choice and a blessing of feminism that we have this choice," says Marjorie Ingall, 36, a married New York writer who kept her name and whose daughter bears her surname. "It's a little old-school to criticize women for any name choice. Wicked old-school is 'You're not taking his name!' More recent -- but still old-school -- is 'You're not keeping your name?'"

A little history: If you think taking a man's name is "positively medieval," you're a little off. In European feudal times, gentry trumped gender: The more powerful surname, his or hers, was retained. But in the later Middle Ages, as property got more scarce, "there was a closing off of the women's right to inherit land," says Stephanie Coontz, a historian at Evergreen State College and the co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. Once women could offer only movable goods as de facto dowry, she says, "the paternal line became much more emphasized."

Then English common law established the deceptively elegant-sounding "coverture," meaning that women were legally covered -- as in subsumed -- by the identity of their husbands. In 1879, when Massachusetts feminist Lucy Stone informed the courts that there was no law requiring her to change her name, what do you know, they drafted one. Amazingly, until the mid-1970s, various state laws prohibited women from registering to vote or getting driver's licenses if they didn't use their husbands' names.

Indeed, laws requiring women to take their husbands' names are excellent ones to shrug off, especially if doing so also involves sticking it to the DMV. But during past century's "second wave" of feminism, many women wanted to both form a life partnership and make it clear that a fish doesn't need a bicycle. Sure enough, Dr. Goldin's data shows a "sharp increase" in women keeping their names between 1975 and 1985.

Then things get weird. "The decrease in 'keeping' [one's name] in the 1990s is more difficult to explain and may be a reflection of a growing traditionalism in American society," says Goldin. She maintains that couples now -- in times of less seismic cultural change than those of their parents -- have a more old-fashioned, romanticized sense of marriage, complete with long engagements and giant weddings. "There's a sense among young people that they can magically put together a marriage that will stick," she says. "And taking someone's last name is part of what many think of as that special glue that will hold them together."

The women I spoke to are not necessarily so starry-eyed. Why take his name? "Because my maiden name was Beaver," says Meg McCormick, 36, a human resources manager in Darnestown, Md. Then there's Donna Perkins, 27, whose maiden name was Reed. "I took my husband's name without a second thought," says Perkins, who works in public health in St. Louis. "I'd rather be old-fashioned by taking my husband's name than by having a name associated with vacuuming in pearls." Then there are the issues of cumbersome hyphenates, affronted in-laws, children's surnames. More broadly, for many women, née Slutsky or not, taking a husband's name is "just easier."

Easier because -- yes -- it's the "norm." "I took my husband's name without really thinking about it, but also because I liked Davies better than Griffith," says Lara Davies, 30, who works in fundraising at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Denver. "I would say 95 percent of my friends have changed their names."

"I like the ease of Kathy and John Bachmann," agrees a 32-year-old corporate strategist in Montclair, N.J. "I had a twinge of identity crisis, but it was fleeting. Ultimately, I changed my name so that the future kiddies wouldn't live a confusing life."

Next Page: "I'm misty-eyed for the days when keeping your name seemed like a small act of political defiance"

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