Why most women still take their husband’s last name

Story at a glance

• Nearly 80 percent of women married to men changed their last name when they got married.

• Women who decided to change their names told The Hill they did so to validate their relationship and share the same last name as their children, among other reasons.

• The reasons so many women still take their husband’s last name also have to do with entrenched gender roles, according to experts.

Even as marriage changes in the United States, most brides are holding to the custom of taking their groom’s last name and dropping their own.

Almost 80 percent of women married to men have followed this tradition, according to a recently released Pew Research Center survey.

The share of women opting to change their name has declined in recent decades, but only gradually: A 2015 Google Consumer Survey conducted by The New York Times found that just 22 percent of women who married men in the 2010s kept their name, compared to 14 percent who got married prior to the 1970s.

There are a number of personal, complex reasons why women choose to change their surname after marriage. But some common motivations cited by women The Hill spoke to include wanting to validate their relationship and to eventually share the same last name as their future children.

Erica Horak, a 26-year-old tech operations specialist in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, falls in the first camp.

Horak told The Hill that she made the decision to take her husband’s last name when she got married two years ago in part because of she felt a lack of connection with her birth name. She had inherited the name from her father, who was not involved in her life. And her mother had taken her stepfather’s last name when Horak was a child.

But the biggest reason why she took her husband’s name, she said, was to increase her connection with the person she was choosing to build a family with.

“I also really like having the same last name as him … It still makes me smile when I see things that say, “Mr. and Mrs. Horak,’” she said. “I think it’s a way to feel even closer to my husband.” 

Twenty-six-year-old Makenzie Rambo, meanwhile, said she wanted her children to share the same last name as their parents, so the decision to change hers was easy.

And Rambo, a nurse also located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, liked the idea of switching up her name. “It was just kind of fun to have a new last name,” she said.

Tina Hall, a 31-year-old New York City resident, took her husband’s last name in part to show her support for the marriage. When the couple first started dating in college, her family pressured her to break up with her now-husband so she could focus on school. They continued to date in secret until Hall’s senior year.

“When we did get married, I was excited to take his name because it was validation for our relationship,” she said.

But she said she also partly made the choice because she grew up believing it was the normal thing to do.

She told The Hill that in every couple she knew during her childhood in Texas and her early adulthood who planned on getting married, the prospective wife planned to take her future husband’s last name. 

“So, I just assumed I would too.” she said. “The default expectation was that I would change my name and I was O.K. with that.” 

Carrie Baker, professor of the study of women and gender at Smith College, noted that “marriage is the one institution in society that we really have not moved beyond traditional roles and behaviors.”

“And I think the fact that women are still changing their names is a sign of that,” she said.

The tradition of U.S. women taking their husband’s last names reaches back to English common law, according to Baker.

The practice is rooted in coverture, a legal doctrine under which a woman’s legal identity was merged into her husband’s when they married.

“It was a whole system of law where a woman was subordinate in a marriage,” Baker said. “She couldn’t even be charged with a crime. If she were to commit a crime, he would be responsible.” 

The system of coverture, brought to the United States by colonists, has eroded over time. But though women have gained more independence from their husbands, and men in general, the idea of a woman of keeping her name after marrying a man remains stigmatized, Baker said.

That stigma is due to American’s concept of masculinity, according to Emerald Christopher, an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University’s women’s and gender studies department.

Culture in many parts of the country — and around the world — still upholds the belief that the man is the head of a household and with that the name follows, Christopher said.

Any deviation from a woman taking her husband’s name could be viewed as abnormal or an insinuation that her husband “isn’t a real man,” Christopher said, in the sense that he doesn’t have the most control in his home.

If a woman does keep her name, others might perceive that “she is the one that is in control” in the relationship, Christopher said.

“While that might be O.K. in private spaces, she still needs to somehow maintain his masculinity,” she said.

In addition, Baker said, U.S. society hasn’t done a very good job at providing women with alternatives to taking their husband’s last name.

But there are other options.

In many Latin American countries, men and women both carry two last names, the first from their father and the second from their mother. In fact, in the Pew study Hispanic women were the most likely to keep their last name out of any racial or ethnic group.

In the study, 30 percent of Hispanic women said they kept their last name after marriage, while 10 percent of White women and 9 percent of Black women said the same.

Traditionally, women in China, Korea and Vietnam keep their surname after marrying, which is also the case in Muslim communities.

And France, Belgium and the Netherlands all have laws requiring people’s surnames to stay the same after marriage.

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