From an early age I knew that if I ever got married, I wanted to keep my name. As a teenager, my boyfriend told me that his parents wouldn't like it, and I remember answering incredulously "What an earth does it have to do with them?" I liked my name. It was as much a part of me as my face.
Then, when I got engaged (in my early thirties, and not to my high school sweetheart), I started to doubt my conviction. I blame the pregnancy hormones: 20 weeks gone and still puking my guts up every day, I became caught up in the idea that to really be a family, the three of us should share a name.
I allowed friends to cajole me. "It's a way of showing your commitment," one happily married friend told me. I asked my fiancé, who said it would be "nice". And that was the end of it. I became Mrs B.
But the name didn't stick. I didn't know who Mrs B was. It was like having a different face. It didn't sound right when I said it or wrote it. I didn't recognise it when I saw it on mail. Mrs Catherine B. Who is she?
I tried a double barrel, reintroducing my maiden name. It was both better and worse; part me, part alien.
In the end I decided I wanted by old name back. I agonised over telling my husband – would he be offended? Upset? Nope. He didn't care. Our marriage was based on mutual love and respect, and changing my name only worked if it worked for me.
My experience has taught me that when it comes to women changing their names after marriage, lots of us still hold quite traditional views. And now recent research shows that as many as 70 per cent of US adults believe women should take their husband's surname. Jaw-droppingly, 50 per cent say that the name change should be enforced by law – that is, women should be fined or spend time in jail for not taking on a new surname.
Sociologist Emily Shafer says that the most common reason people gave for advocating for name change was the belief that women should prioritise marriage and family ahead of themselves.
To investigate further, Shafer conducted a study asking people to comment on a made up scenario. In it, respondents were randomly assigned either Carol Sherman, Carol Sherman-Cook, or Carol Cook (married to Bill Cook).
Survey participants were told that Carol had been spending a lot of extra hours at her office job hoping for a promotion. Her husband Bill was starting to feel burdened by her absence as he was picking up her slack in housework.
Respondents were then asked to rate how committed they thought Carol was to being a wife. This was determined by answering how many days Carol's husband should be okay with her working late per week, and rating how justified he would be in divorcing her.
Shafer notes that the results were surprising. "Among women and highly educated men, women's surname choice seem to have little effect on their perceptions of women as a wife or the standards to which she is held in marriage," she says.
However the men who were less educated thought a woman who chose a different last name from her husband's was less committed to the marriage, and that her husband would be more justified in filing for a divorce. They perceived Carol Sherman to be neglecting her marriage far more than Carol Cook was.
Speaking to Broadly, Shafer said that it's important to understand how people see marital name changes because they are a reflection of wider gender attitudes.
"On a larger level there is a body of literature that shows that when women act too agentic – which is to say they act too much like men in the workplace, they act in their own self-interest ... they face backlash in the workplace context.
"My work shows that women can face backlash at home as well if they're not acting 'properly' as wives."
Shafer also says that the statistics reflect our cultural view "that women should put their families ahead of themselves: a view that we don't have for men."
This explains some of the pressure I felt about taking my husbands name and the angst I felt when I decided to change it back – would people think I was a bad wife and mother?
Shafer says that attitudes will change when more women start keeping their names (or, like me, changing them back!). "Most people accept that [women] can both work and be a good mum at the same time. That's because the vast majority of women do it now," she says.
"Maybe it takes a certain amount of women to do a certain act before people start to accept it."
Comments