"Why do women still change their names?"

The BBC asks that question in a long article examining the history and current practice surrounding marriage, and women changing their surnames to that of their husband.

In the US, most women adopt their husband’s family name when they get hitched – around 70%, according to one of the largest data analyses in recent years. For British women, the figure is almost 90%, according to a 2016 survey, with around 85% of those aged between 18 and 30 still following the practice. Although these figures are lower than they were a generation ago, it’s clear it remains a strong cultural norm in large parts of the western world, despite today’s more individualistic and gender-aware era. While definitions of feminism vary, 68% of women under 30 describe themselves as feminists in the US and around 60% in the UK.

“It is quite surprising... [so many women adopt the man’s name] since it comes from patriarchal history, from the idea that a woman, on marriage, became one of the man’s possessions,” says Simon Duncan, a professor in family life at the University of Bradford, UK, who has been researching the practice of male name-taking. He describes the tradition as “entrenched” in most English-speaking countries, even though the concept of “owning” wives was scrapped more than a century ago in Britain, and there is currently no legal requirement to take a man’s name.

Much of western Europe also follows the same pattern (notable exceptions include Spain and Iceland, where women tend to keep their birth names when they marry, and Greece, which has made it a legal requirement for wives to retain their names for life since 1983). Even in Norway, which is regularly ranked one of the top countries for gender equality and has a less overtly patriarchal history, the majority of married women still take their husband’s name. There, however, around half of name-takers keep their maiden name as a middle name, which functions as a secondary surname.

“The question remains... is this just a harmless tradition, or is there some sort of meaning leaking from those times to now?” asks Duncan, who recently teamed up with academics at the University of Oslo and the University of the West of England to delve into the reasons for its persistence.

There's more at the link.

I've often asked myself the same question.  I agree that a woman changing her name to that of her husband is largely a patriarchal tradition.  It probably stems from the Biblical perspective that the husband is the boss:

"Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.  For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.  Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything."

That passage doesn't go down very well with modern, "liberated" women!  Many people fail to put it in perspective.  It was written in a patriarchal society, where women had few (if any) rights of their own.  They were basically possessions, first of their fathers, then of their husbands.  It's not surprising that the patriarchally-minded men who wrote about faith would see life from that perspective.  It's still that way in many traditional tribal societies, particular in Africa.

Nowadays, we understand that men and women are equal as human beings, both in the sight of God and in their personal interactions.  They have different roles, sure, but those roles don't confer superiority or inferiority.  They're just roles.  They don't define the humanity of the person involved.

I see no reason, in modern society, why a woman should have to change her surname to that of her husband.  If she wants to, sure, why not?  However, if she doesn't want to, equally, why not?  For that matter, what if the husband wants to change his name to that of his wife?  I can't think of any reason why that should be forbidden when it's so common the other way around.  If there's no name change, there are a few practical issues - for example, what surname would the kids use? - but those can be dealt with.

What do you think, readers?  Let us know in Comments.

Peter