In March, the wedding website TheKnot.com surveyed nearly 19,000 women who got married last year. Of those women, 86 percent took their husband’s name. The practice of women keeping their names, first introduced in the U.S. by suffragette Lucy Stone in the 1850s and popularized during the Women’s Rights Movement of the early 1970s, peaked in the 1990s at 23 percent. By the 2000s, only 18 percent of women were keeping their names, according to a 2009 study published in the journal Social Behavior and Personality. Now, according to TheKnot, it’s at just 8 percent.
But the fact that most women are willing to change their names doesn’t mean the decision is an easy one. Making that choice can bring up all sorts of emotions — and we’re not just talking about the homicidal urges prompted by back-to-back visits to the DMV and the Social Security office.
“I’m not a Kardashian, but I still had a whole life based on my name,” said Baily Bernius, 24, who works for a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., and was known as Baily Tombs until she got married last year and took her husband’s name. “It was a bittersweet thing,” she said.
So why did she do it?
“It’s kind of a way to show the world that I’m part of a new family now and that I’m proud to take my husband’s name,” Bernius said. Her desire to do that, she said, outweighed her occasional feelings of envy toward the girls her brothers date.
“I sometimes think about that: Whoever my brothers marry, they’re going to inherit what I consider to be an awesome name,” she said. “I look at their girlfriends and I’m like, ‘You need to earn this name.'”
There are a myriad of options when it comes to the name-change debate: you can keep your name, take his, take his last name and make your maiden name your middle name, take his last name legally but keep yours professionally, or hyphenate the two names (TheKnot’s survey found that just 6 percent of women hyphenated their names last year, and the practice seems to get a collective “no thanks” from women in wedding website community forums).
Women who keep their names have tended to marry older, have higher levels of education and are more likely to work in medicine, the arts or entertainment than women who take their husband’s names, according to the 2009 study. But when women who’ve built entire brands on their maiden names are giving them up — like Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry, who’s legally Mrs. Brand now — the trend can seem even more pervasive.
Women “view it as some crazy glue holding their marriage together,” said Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economics professor. In 2004, Goldin studied the New York Times‘ marriage announcements, Massachusetts birth records and Harvard alumni records, and found that fewer college-educated women were keeping their names than in the 1970s and 1980s.
The reasons women cite for taking their spouse’s surname vary: some like the tradition of it, and others find it romantic. In some cases, it’s more important to their husbands, and some feel it will be more convenient once they have children. Some women even argue, counterintuitively, that taking their husband’s name is a feminist choice.
