Hmph. Yeah, I legally changed my name to my DH’s b/c I was delighted to have the opportunity to get rid of my father’s, except I kept that one (informally only) because I’d already published under it. It’s surprisingly maddening not to, e.g., be able to remember whether my health records are in my maiden name or my married name (depends … did I last see this doctor when I was covered through DH’s work’s insurance or mine, where I’m listed in my work, i.e., maiden name.). OTOH it greatly simplifies my life in that I maintain separate Facebook accounts for each identity and needn’t worry that my colleagues aren’t really interested in seeing yet another photo of my preschooler.

(If I had it to do over, I might have left my name alone knowing that, as Miss Manners assures me, I can never (grammatically) be Mrs. Myfirstname Hubbylastname anyway but that I am Mrs. Hubbyfirstname Hubbylast name (i.e. never “Mrs. Jane Smith” but by definition Mrs. John Smith whether I take his name or not, since Mrs. means ‘wife of’). So Mrs. (and Mr.) Joe Ehrlich can chill out.)

Couldn’t resist.

“Alma tell us/all modern women are jealous
You should have a statue in Bronze/ for bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz”

I have had people ask me why I didn’t change my name, and look sad when I explain. If a name change is supposed to represent the unity of marriage, the furthest I can go is hyphenating the two names, sorry.

Also the non-Anglo-Irish in Ireland don’t change their names either until after the mid-nineteenth-century.

Totally agree. Men, no less than women, generally inherit a surname that once upon a time was seen as the property not of an individual (whether male or female), but of a broader (though no doubt patriarchal) family/kinship group. What rankles now about this naming business is that names are now seen as belonging to individuals (“his” name, “her” name, and so on), but it’s only women who are expected to unsettle their sense of individuality by going all pre-modern upon marriage.

I certainly do not believe that “it’s your father’s name, anyway, and not your mother’s” means that women should therefore just capitulate to the default and change their surnames upon marriage. In fact, I’d prefer that women *didn’t* change their surnames to those of their husbands. But I’m no longer inclined to get all judgmental about women changing their names, given the obvious difficulties of escaping patrilineal nomenclature.

In Scotland, as noted by Feminist Avatar above, historically a woman did not legally change her surname upon marriage (but that name was not really “hers” in the way that we now understand names to refer to unique individuals: it was that of her kinship group; but then, so too was that of husband’s not really “his” name either, but that of his kinship group also). From the mid- to late-eighteenth-century, though, as I understand it, Scottish women were increasingly, if informally [though still not legally], known by their spouses’ surnames, in the English mode, which may have been considered more “rational,” or perhaps “classier.”