Women's Names in U.S. History
From the Suffragists to the Feminists
Even though the “notion of women as property is an anachronism, no longer supported by the legal system or accepted by the general public, … naming conventions still largely mirror this traditional view” (Scheuble 143). In fact, it is only since the 1970s that married women in the U.S. have been legally free to keep their own names. Up until that point, “states required married women to take their husbands' names in order to engage in basic activities such as voting and driving” (Emens 763).
Some women, including famous suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, made their last name into a middle name and were known by three names in public. The first woman to be recorded in American history as desiring to not use her husband’s name after marriage was Lucy Stone, another prominent suffragist. While she took her husband’s name at first, becoming Lucy Stone Blackwell, about a year later she asked that Susan B. Anthony record her name as simply Lucy Stone in the list of participants at an 1856 convention. She has been quoted with the following: “A wife should no more take her husband’s name than he should hers. My name is my identity and must not be lost” (lucystoneleague.org).
By the time of the women’s movement in the United States in the 1960s and 70s, feminists began calling for women to carefully consider what giving up their name meant, and to keep their name as a symbol of their individual identity and resistance to men’s dominance. They believed that the patriarchal naming tradition was sexist and hostile to women because:
- It forced women to be the ones in a marriage to give up their identity and name.
- It made women bear the burden of changing their name on all of their legal documents and records (and changing it back if they got divorced).
- It compelled women to publicly “profess their status as either married or divorced” based on if they still had their family name or not (Arichi 413).
Current Trends
Patriarchal naming traditions are still the norm in most Western societies, proving that the resistance to change is strong. Despite the fact that “women in many countries have now gained the right to retain their own surnames when they marry, few women choose to take up this right, and most do not even question the values or consequences behind it” (Arichi 411). Women continue to tolerate the inconvenience of changing their name when they get married. In the U.S., the “new bride must write to 
various authorities to change her name on, for example, her driver’s license, vehicle title, voter registration, U.S. passport, bank records, credit cards, medical records, insurance forms, wills, contracts and, most importantly, Social Security and Internal Revenue Service documents. To make the process less cumbersome, ‘bride name change kits’ tailored for each state are sold on the Internet” (Goldin 146).
However, there have been a small number of women choosing to reject the status quo and forge different naming methods upon marriage. Various women have:
- kept their last name
- hyphenated their last name with their husband’s
- kept their last name as a middle name
- created a new name as a combination of theirs and their husband’s
Also, some women return to their original name after divorce as a signal that they are moving past the old stage of their lives.
The Future
"What laws should govern spouses' names at marriage? If a man and a woman marry, should the woman's name change automatically? Or should the woman's name remain the same unless she goes through more or less complicated steps to change it? Contrary to convention, should the man's name change to the woman's? Should both their names be hyphenated? Many variations could be imagined” (Emens 763). Indeed, but even with so many options now available, women still overwhelmingly continue down the same path that was forced on them for generations. The future of marital names remains uncertain.
Sources
Arichi, Masumi. “Is It Radical? Women's Right to Keep Their Own Surnames After Marriage.” Women's Studies International Forum 22.4 (1999): 411-415. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VBD-3XBV750-3/2/cd75812cacfe6d9ed0b2134d98960851
Emens, Elizabeth F. "Changing Name Changing: Framing Rules and the Future of Marital Names." The University of Chicago Law Review 74.3 (2007): 761-863. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4495622
Goldin, Claudia, and Maria Shim. “Making a Name: Women’s Surnames at Marriage and Beyond.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 18.2 (2004): 143-160. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3216895
Scheuble, Laurie K., and David R. Johnson. “Married Women’s Situational Use of Last Names: An Empirical Study.” Sex Roles 53.1-2 (2005): 143-151. http://www.springerlink.com/content/g6w4734546u52077/
http://www.lucystoneleague.org/
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