Why do the majority of women still take their partner's last name?
Back in the medieval ages when a woman was married to a man, they were basically considered property for my understanding and treated like an extension of the man's person and family. So it was customary for women to take the man's last name since they were being joined to his family. But now here in the 21st century women are fully independent and last names don't really seem to mean much of anything. I mean what is Smith or McGregor or any last name really mean anymore? Especially in the digital age, lots of people have digital usernames like SarahSmith1727373. So the last name clearly doesn't mean much anymore.... Which leads me to wonder, why do the majority of women still take the man's last name? Especially when some of them have a horrible last name? I have seen some butt ass ugly last names recently, like Fink, Weimer, Slotsky/Slotsky, Hiscock (no joke this is a last name), Hardman.... And then you hear the woman's name and it's like something way more reasonable and less stupid sounding like Kingman, or Harrison, Walls, etc.
It's pretty helpful for medical emergencies and getting through border police as a family.
Medical emergencies and also look up on social media.
I think the only correct answer will be "there are lots of different reasons".
My wife took my last name, even though it's not a good one and I suggested that we pick a new one.
Here are a couple of her reasons:
She wanted us to have the same surname.
She was very close friends with my cousins growing up, so the name didn't seem weird to her.
Tradition - she'd always assumed she would change her name to her husband's name, so that seemed the most normal thing to do.
Two short answers: Tradition and simplicity.
If you have different names, which one do the kids get? Also, it's sometimes challenging to fill in school forms when your kid has a different last name than you.
This it the real answer. It's usually just easier to do it because it's the expected situation.
Both, that’s what me and my wife did. It was recently allowed here, but it has been common in Spanish speaking countries for example.
Exactly, this is a strange concept to get hung up on. In China and North and South Korea, a woman in a stereotypical heterosexual marriage keeps her name and the children get the father's name. There are numerous traditions globally.
Yeah, but in South Korea they also give you pickles witch your pizza!
What does that have to do with this situation? Nothing. I'm just bored, and think it's a weird thing they do....
How's your day going?
I don't really like both as a compromise.
What if your children did the same? And their children too?
After a while you'd have 30+ names in your last name.
They get one per parent, not all of the previous ones. The child of Juan Lopez Sánchez and Ana Heredia Marín would be called Firstname Lopez Heredia. If this child had a child with Luisa Ribera Zapatero the kid would be Firstname Lopez Ribera.
By default the fathers last name goes first, but they can decide to swap the last names to put the mother's first.
When they get married and or get children they can pick only one to continue. So that the names don’t get super long indeed.
My mother took my father's surname and kept her maiden name as a second middle name, then they named their children the same way. That ended up being the smoothest way to handle it for official documents.
I'm actually gonna be taking my girlfriend's last name. Mine sounds hella stupid and is also slang for an unflattering body part, I got bullied a lot for it growing up so I will spare my children and take her last name cause it sounds super fancy and cool.
That makes sense, Cyberm Ass.
Cyberm would be a silly first name.
It is obviously Cyber M. Ass.
The M is short for My.
The guy was bullied already for his last name, and now you're calling his first name silly? I am reporting you to the mods, Spankm.
Shame on you for deadnaming!
If the guy gets his MD in proctology he can be Dr. Ass.
Mulva?
Good idea Mr. Taint
I think you're making a good choice Mr. Beer Belly
Many people are fine with changing their names and the ones that aren't won't do it. There's your answer. Don't rag on the people that like changing their name.
Pew Research has survey data germane to this question. As it stands, a clear majority (79%) of opposite-sex married women changed their family/last name to their husband's.
But for never-married women, only a third (33%) said they would change their name to their spouse's family name. 24% of never-married women were unsure whether they would or wouldn't change their name upon marriage.
From this data, I would conclude that while the trend of taking the husband's last name is fairly entrenched right now, the public's attitude are changing and we might expect the popularity of this to diminish over time. The detailed breakdown by demographic shows that the practice was less common (73%) in the 18-49 age group than in the 50+ age group (85%).
However, some caveats: the survey questions did not inquire into whether the never-married women intended on ever getting married; it simply asked "if you were to get married...". So if marriage as a form of cohabitation becomes less popular in the future, then the change-your-family-name trend could be in sharper decline than this data would suggest.
Alternatively, the data could reflect differences between married and never-married women. Perhaps never-married women -- by virtue of not being married yet -- answered "would not change name" because they did not yet know what their future spouse's name is. No option for "it depends on his name" was offered by the survey. Never-married women may also more-strongly consider the paperwork burden -- USA specific -- for changing one's name.
So does this help answer your question? Eh, only somewhat. Younger age and left-leaning seem to be factors, but that's a far cry from cause-and-effect. Given how gradual the trend is changing, it's more likely that the practice is mostly cultural. If so, then the answer to "why is cultural practice XYZ a thing?" is always "because it is".
Thanks for providing this really detailed and interesting reply. Lots of good insight here. For the 'Postgraduate degree' group, I wonder if they're dramatically higher due to the frustrating problems associated with name changes? Like if you publish an academic paper with your full name, you can't easily go back and change it, so that may affect it... huh.
I have friends who published before being married, so now professionally still use their own last name (for continuity) but socially will go by their husband’s last name.
I think each woman has her own reasons (some people actually like traditions) but I have the impression that, globally, women are not the same as what we see online. I think today the taking of a surname does not indicate ownership or property, at least to most modern women (and men).
I don't think any woman thinks like that anymore, or perhaps not many, so the motivations would then also be obviously different.
I'm from a different culture than my husband and my last name was a bureaucratic nightmare. Almost didn't make it into university because of computer mix ups, have had issues filing taxes, voting, getting a passport, settings basic IDs, getting insurance... It's endless. Changed my name as soon as I could, and even THAT process was hindered by my original name.
Bonuses: Distance myself from social media I had as a child. Harder for former stalkers to locate me if they decide to rekindle their previous obsessions. Don't need to upset one set of grandparents when you name your children one parent's last name and not the other. People stop asking me where I'm from and making racist assumptions about me. Everyone seems a lot friendlier now that they assume I'm [insert European white race here] instead of [insert non-white race here] and that's despite the fact that I'm clearly white. Racism is wild. My signature is way shorter.
Not saying this should be the norm, but I was happy it was a socially acceptable option for me.
Duper curious what it was now
Yeah, not the name itself but why it was a bureaucratic nightmare.
Please don't DOX yourself.
Nothing too complex. I come from a culture where you take one last name from each parent. No hyphen. Just FirstName LastName1 LastName2.
Some systems put LastName1 as my middle name and shortened it to one letter. Some excluded LastName2. Some squished both last names into one name, sometimes with a hyphen, sometimes not.
But because every system did its own thing, no one could ever find me. I had 2 different credit scores at one point. I received 3 voting cards every election, all of them wrong, despite the fact that every election cycle I would take the hours it takes to report the errors and get them to "fix" it. I was enrolled twice in one class in grade 4 under two separate wrong names. And whatever name my high school used on their system, I wasn't showing up when universities searched for my records, so I kept getting rejection letter after rejection letter with no explanation and it took me months to track down the cause and have it fixed, by which point it was too late to get into several schools. I also couldn't buy certain things online because some stores' paymentet methods wouldn't let me put in the name of my credit card as it was written. Oh, and the government couldn't get the name on my social insurance card and the name on my taxes to match. This affected my online logins, so I would need to call on the phone to verify myself for each tax-related transaction, including simple address changes.
Yikes, that sounds like an absolute nightmare
My wife did, despite me saying I'd rather she not. Me changing to her name was not legally possible in our situation (me US citizen, her JP citizen, both living in and married in Japan). (Edit: What I wanted to do was change to her name, but that doesn't happen unless I give up US and my other citizenship, apply for and get JP citizenship, and choose her maiden name as my name or do that but a name combining hers and the sound from the start of mine rendered in kanji).
Her reasoning was that we could quickly and easily remove basically all doubt that we are related with just what ID we both always carry. Her usecase was one of us being critically injured or something and being able to gain access in the hospital or something else like that.
I took my partner's last name because I like their family more than mine, and I liked the idea of no longer being associated with my family.
But I think most people just want to do what is normal or expected of them, so I would imagine that is why most women change their name. Not doing so would go against the grain, putting them in awkward situations where they have to explain they didn't take the last name.
My partner likes my family more than hers, but has continued to keep her ex-husband's surname because she likes it better than both her childhood one and mine.
........was her ex Hardcock?
No, it's boring and generic. He name before sounded like a rude word, and mine is just weird and literally always mispronounced by everyone.
Can’t speak for all women, but I (and I imagine some others) changed my name because I knew I’d be having kids and didn’t want there to be any confusion. Like, if I’m traveling internationally or if my kid ends up in the hospital, I don’t want one of us having to fish out a birth certificate to prove we’re both the parents. Also I’m of the percent that absolutely hated my long last name so the chance for my name to be shorter and nicer was a no brainer.
I think this is a big reason. Having a common family name helps solidify the family as a unit.
In several countries it's simply not possible, and the family bonds are strong as elsewhere, if not stronger. China for example, family is above everything there, and you can't change names under any circumstances.
That's something I didn't know. Do you have time to explain how that works in China? Or if there's a good video essay on the subject I'd take that.
In China you simply keep your birth name forever, and children always follow the paternal side. That's why having a male heir is important there, because a woman will only bear offspring for her spouse's family.
As to why the family bonds are so strong, it's part cultural (your elders are always right and must not be criticised, and you must take care of your blood above anything else), part societal - parents work too much (60-100h weekly), so children are generally raised by their grandparents, which strengthens the bond across generations. And because the pension system is totally insufficient, grandparents will at some point typically move in with their kids, so people are used to live in a multi generational household.
By the way, China is just one example, there are even Western countries where it's not possible to change the names, such as Luxembourg.
Thank you for taking the time. I find it interesting that it is so important in some cultures for the woman to take the husband's name, and yet in this example there seems to be zero problems with it ...
I've dated a few people who seemed progressive, and I'm a woke-ass queer, but names were a sticking point. I have a complicated welsh travesty of a name I would happily trade in for something shorter - so when I got engaged and I didn't like his name either, and neither did he, I suggested we both pick something new and change our names together. I mean, if it's no big deal for me to change my name, it shouldn't be for him either, right? Anyway, I'm single now.
Well, that took a turn. Sorry to hear that! I love how picking/making a new together is becoming slightly more common that in earlier decades.
She takes my hoodies, my snacks, my cash, the blankets... why wouldn't she take my name?
(She didn't take my name.)
Hah, same on every single account.
Yeah but it's easy when both parents already had the same last name 🪕
My wife and I think it is. I took her last name since it meant more to her.
My mother kept her last name. There was never an issue at school etc. I run into more issue now, everyone thinks my uncle (mom’s brother) is my dad because of the last names.
I went from a "normal" western last name that was ethnically coded (like McCoy) to another ethnically coded name (like Nguyen, or - um - Fink).
My options were to keep a common and dull name that I share with people I don't like, get a new one (that I'd need to spell to every customer service representative ever), hyphenate (HELL NO), or make up something new (which would involve a shitstorm among relatives on both sides.)
The only real options were A and B. I was undecided until we were leaving the county courthouse after we were married. He asked me "are you going to change your name?" He didn't care. He thought it was a weird custom and was curious. And I realized - this is an opportunity. It's a relatively easy and socially acceptable way to shed your old name.
I took it.
The new name honestly messes with quite a few people who are meeting me for the first time, and it's interesting to see how they react. I've had people ask straightforward questions (I prefer that - there's an easy and straightforward answer), get half-way through a straight-up racist comment before they stutter to a stop (helps me get to know them), get all the way through a racist comment (again - helpful to know where you stand), or just not comment at all (just fine by me).
I've found that it's not the worst way to get a read on someone.
tldr: part spite, part novelty, part legitimately helpful when your profession means you need to meet strangers and get a quick read on their personality/potential biases/willingness to be straightforward when there's no reason to be weird about it
I suspect a lot of women despite not wanting to be considered property, still place value on belonging with their partner. The western tradition of the man being the figurative head of household is still pretty prevalent. These two factors (and more, I'm sure) likely have some influence.
One other reason I imagine is to establish a single family name, especially with children in mind. I'm not sure it actually works better than a double damily name, but it probably seems so to some.
My husband and I were not married when our kids were born. I wanted to have the same name as my kids So I gave them my maiden name. I never really liked that name and I wasn't particularly close to my dad, so when my husband and I got married, we all changed our names to his.
I also took my husband's name when I got married. I personally am not a big fan of hyphenated names. For those that like them, fair enough, but they're not for me. To me, the problem with hyphenated names is that while they seem a way to avoid the "whose name do we give the kids" problem, they just kick the problem down the road a generation. If you have a hyphenated name, and you marry someone who also has one, are you both going to start using a 4-part surname? How about the generations after that, are they going to use an 8, 16, or 32-part name?
Of course not. At some point, now or in the future, someone is going to have their surname dropped. It either happens when you get married, or it happens when your children or grandchildren themselves get married and have to decide which names to drop. Rather than putting that burden on your kids or grandkids, I think it's better to make those hard decisions yourself. Better to just come up with a shared name for both partners and move forward together.
Well, my last name isn't my mom's last name, it's my dad's, and her last name was her dad's, then her husband's. So why do I care, I don't get a matrilineal name anyway.
I hyphenated, because we both had kids when we got married, and it made it easier to deal with the school stuff for my stepkids.
Otherwise, I really just don't care because my family name is my dad's name and it was only my mom's name because she changed hers to his. Not that I didn't care about my dad, was closer to him than my mom. I just mean I don't feel like it means anything.
ETA: as the OP says, though - I really, truly don't understand it when a lady has a cool last name and the man an awful one and they still use his. I used to work at a payroll place and saw this happen over and over, someone would be calling up for us to change their last name from, say, Valiant or DeLeon to Assing, or Fuckler or something . Really, why wouldn't he be the one happy to change in that scenario?
I took my husband's last name because it was important to him, and I wasn't super attached to mine. Also, it has 2 Z's in it, and that's one of the coolest letters.
Is your last name is Lizzard? /s
Eggyzz.
Zardoz?
My SO and have talked about possibly changing both of our last names when married. Neither of us are tied to or really care about our current names for any reason so why not just start fresh.
At least for my ex-fiancée it was about the link between husband and wife, plus tradition. It was basically "I'm married, you see?". Just like a ring.
(We talked a fair bit about this stuff, as back then I was planning to add my maternal surname to my legal name. She was OK taking either surname.)
A. Many men would not marry a woman who didn’t take their name.
B. Makes parenting more difficult in social settings by not sharing the last name of your kids. I.E. Picking up your kid at school or making medical decisions about kids and having a different last name as the child forces you to jump through a lot more hoops.
C. Women tend to grow up knowing they are going to change their last name it’s not even an afterthought. My girlfriend told me her and her friends would often talk about what their name would be if they married a guy they liked.
D. In some states it is very difficult for a man to change their last name but for women the processes is already in place.
Regarding B, the way we do it in the latin world is just by having 2 last names, one per parent. So the child of Jose Perez and Irene Martinez is named Alberto Perez Martinez (the fathers last name is the first by default but you can change order). Its not a problem when picking up children from schools or whatever.
Tradition, mostly. When I discussed this with my fiancee she just wants to - I certainly don't care. My one cousin went with both hyphenated, in alphabetical order so hers was first.
My wife didn't and years down the line she says she wish she had. We have to go through more with medical things and such to show we are related and it was like a simple checkbox for her to do it when we got married but to do it now is a major pain in the ass.
I had discussed it with my wife. I didn't want her to feel obligated to do so, and I know it would be awkward at her work to change her last name, but ultimately she wanted to - so I guess that's one reason?
There is a degree of closeness from it that I think some people appreciate. If you all share a last name, perhaps you feel closer as a family? I've known some people that don't share the same last name as their kids, or people that went double-barrelled, but didn't with their kids, and some of them had either changed later, or regretted not having the "same" name.
This isn’t a thing in India unless there is a ‘value’ in the surname.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't India also use a system where your marriage is set up 30 years ahead of time while your mom is still pregnant with you?
To all the people here arguing that it's easier to have a family name, especially with children: It's also possible that the husband takes the wife's name. But from anecdotal evidence in my acquaintance, most men are very opposed to this idea. So if the woman wants a family name she has to change her name or have endless fights about it. That's why most women I know did it.
Having one name is easier for social reasons. Going with the man's name is easier for social reasons.
It all comes down to social pressure to keep the status quo. I even offered to take my wife's last name and she declined and took mine instead.
Having one name (at least in common, using hyphenation) is easier for legal reasons too. If you have kids, and one parent doesn't share a last name with them, you'll have headaches at school, maybe crossing a border, unless you brought some extra legal documents with, etc.
In Sweden, a couple can choos to have a new last name not related to either.
You can choose another last name when you get married in the US too, but people just don't choose to for the most part. The marriage license name change is a shortcut to a regular name change that can be made through the courts.
Oh didn't know that
We had a brief talk where I said I like my name and wouldn’t change it. I also said that while I prefer the tradition of her changing hers, that I understood it’s not really my choice. She did anyway
I have a coworker whose maiden name is Dykes. She was very happy to change.
Having the same last name is just an easy way to show togetherness and unity. My wife kept her last name because she earned her MD with it but she's fine going by Mrs. (my last name) in a parental setting.
For me, it was because my husbands last name was simpler than my maiden name.
Because everyone knows who the mother is through birth and following months/years if they're lucky, and the only connection a father has with his children is a last name.
It's quite reasonable that mums want the same surname as their children so ..
The trouble with that is that between twenty and thirty percent of children, depending on source, call the wrong person 'dad'.
No child calls the 'wrong' person dad. Dad is an earned title between a parent and child. Ejaculating doesn't make you a dad, just a sperm donor.
Same goes for Mom by the way unless you think adopted parents are also illegitimate.
Dude, I get that infidelity sucks but you have to be a real fucking asshole to think that makes the dads into "dads".
Dude, just because your feelings are hurt doesn't mean it's a crime.
Let's put mothers in jail for paternity fraud, then we cut the parental rights of the dad because he's not the real dad. Then we put the kid in an orphanage, or maybe force the sperm donor (upstanding gentleman who nuts and runs with married women) to raise the now 10 year old who did nothing wrong.
If your partner commits adultery you divorce them, but you don't abandon your kids. As a father if I found out my kids have a different genetic father, they're still my kids. I love them. You can't just give them up because they're not your genetic legacy, that's not how love works at all!
What a horrible image you have of masculinity to include a father seeing his own children as "criminal paternity fraud" and "theft of resources". I can't think of a single friend of mine that would give up his kids, or seek to jail their mother, if he found out they're not his. Many would leave their wives to be sure, but they'd still love their kids, that's not something they can give up even if they wanted to.
Also your stats are WHACK. 13% of women have EVER had an affair of any kind yet 20-30% of kids are 'paternity fraud'. Bro imma need a source on those numbers, and I don't want to see any qanon incel Jordan Peterson Andrew Tate shit. I'd be surprised if the real numbers were more than 2%.
https://techreport.com/statistics/lifestyle/cheating-statistics/
You're seriously wondering why women would want to take Hardcock? Buddy, I hate to be the one one to have to tell you this, I even hate to even type it, but women LOVE Hardcock. It's a fun name. It's fun to say. What woman wouldn't want Hardcock coming out of their mouth? Plus you get to attend the family gatherings on holidays and family reunions. Just a woman, surrounded by Hardcocks. Hardcocks as far as the eye can see!
.........why is everybody giggling?
I didn't change my name. My perspective is that my identity doesn't change just because I got married. My name has been mine since birth and it'll remain that way.
After we were married wife kept her last name, partially for professional reasons partially because she didn't like my last name :-) When we had kids we decided that the kids would have my last name to avoid hyphen hell and her last name is super generic so any time she has to search for an account at the bank or anything like that she almost always has someone else with the same first and last name it can be a pain to find the correct "her"
Makes things easier for both parties when medical issues arise, even more so for parents. And I genuinely believe that a lot of women don't know it's an option.
I actually didn't change my name when my mom married my dad, so you can really just say "no." i was in middle school when I decided that, but whenever my dad tried to do anything, he had to jump through hoops. 🤷🏿♀️
I am originally from Spain but have since moved abroad where partners changing names is common.
Personally I love the way it is handled in Spain, where you get your family name at birth and won't be changed by marrying (you could change it but it is not normal to do it when you get married). And the family name is always a combination of both parents. Traditionally it was the first family name from the father and the first from the mother, but nowadays it can be decided which goes first. So officially everyone's got two family names, one from each parent. Unofficially you can just go as far as you want, so you get your given name, then first family name from one parent, then first from the other, then the second from the first, then the second from the second, etc. So if you track your family tree you can take all family names to make a huge list of them, which is not used for anything but somehow makes you be more attached to all those roots without names being lost.
Of course that makes it a nightmare when going to other places, everyone thinks your first family name is a middle name and dealing with two family names officially can be a pain. And let's not go into naming your kids then...
When I was marrying my wife she asked me how I felt about her changing her name to mine and if I wanted her to do that. She got her father's name but her mother divorced him later on and changed her name back and my wife's father was not much part of her life, so she was happy to just change it. I told her that for me that custom is a bit strange and I didn't need her to do it but would accept it if she wanted to (knowing her background), so whatever she did I wanted it to be her choice, but notice how in Spain people who share family name are siblings, as it is extremely rare for two persons to share both first and second name if not related, so sharing family name with my wife is really odd in a way...
At the end she changed her name, but because in this country you only have one she only took the first one. While our kids had to take either both of mine or hers (we had our first kid before us marrying and her changing name, so we chose mine), so now we all share the first (and only, in the case of my wife) family name but me and my kids have both my first and second family name (any kids after the first kid must get the same name).
If that was not complex enough, as I got my kids both nationalities, in Spain the rule is always first of one parent plus first of the other parent, and as the first one was born before us marrying, in Spain he has a different family name than he does where we live.
I'm a fan of the hyphen strategy. I really don't wanna change my last name just cause I fell in love. But hyphenation sounds like a good compromise.
Hmm but what do you do if your name is already hyphenated? You can't just keep bolting names together so that's not a solution for more than one generation.
You do make a fair point. I just imagined someone trying to fit their entire genealogy on their ID like Daenerys Targaryen.
My wife took my last name because she had her father’s last name. He abandoned her shortly after birth and never attempted to get in touch with her. He quit jobs to avoid paying support. She did it to remove that last vestige of him from her life. Had she had her mother’s last name we would have hyphenated our names together.
It helps with legal documents and proof of ownership of equity if both last names are the same. Taking the man's last name is just an archaic tradition but I do agree that having both last names the same is useful.
I will say though that people who hyphenate both their last name's are fucking psychopaths. Just choose one. Don't make other people have to remember 2 last names.
It's tradition in my country but not mandatory. The archaic government system is also easier to navigate through if a married couple have same the last name. Because it's so common for a wife to take her husband's last name, it immediately raises eyebrows when people claim to be married but have different surnames. In our case, my wife took my last name because she just likes it better than hers. It's neutral and easier to pronounce.
I can't say for sure why. When I got married she just wanted to take one of my names (I have two last names). I'm not famous or anything, so it doesn't carry any clout. Maybe she wanted a fancy sounding hyphenated name too, because she added one of mine to her current one.
but you also just used 2 names in your example... others here already said the right stuff, but I reiterate, it's a lot of symbolism helping create feelings of unity in a family unit, but also there are legal issues/benefits for changing a last name.
When I get married, I'm thinking hyphenated, with her using her last name first, and vice versa. But last names can be pretty large. Idk how to tackle that.
Now is the lastname Kangaroo, or PussyKangeroo?
Ackshually, its El Kangaroo, the Pussy is silent.
What is this? The 1800s?
Its the FINAL COUNTDOWN! PINUNEEENUUUUU!
This conversation is so white and western culture centric. Many cultures have different norms. Centering on this as the normal/accepted route is strange given how international our societies have become.
True, for instance in Québec, Canada, it is illegal for a woman to take her husband name.
Well, it's gender neutral, neither party can (legally) change their name after marriage. That seems weird to me. Let people do what they want.
My friends in Italy have told me that it's not normal to change your surname after marriage. They could be messing with me, though. They're mildly evil.