According to a study published last month in the Netherlands, women who adopt their husband’s name after marriage are seen as less intelligent, less competent, and less ambitious, but more caring, more dependent, and more emotional—in other words, more stereotypically feminine.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t find these results particularly surprising. When I got married two years ago, I thought long and hard about whether or not to change my name, and the fear of losing credibility was a major factor. I knew that if I changed my name, I was running the risk of being seen as a traditionalist, a submissive, a weak-minded woman. I realized that taking my husband’s name might be signaling to the world, “I want a family”. I even feared that if I didn’t keep my birth name, I would be betraying my gender, setting women’s liberation back a hundred years.
I changed my name anyway.
I did not come to this decision lightly—it was months of back and forth, reading articles on both sides and consulting every woman I knew on the subject. In the end, though, it came down to one thing: I wanted to share my husband’s last name.
I don’t regret this decision, even after reading the results of the study. You see, in grappling with this subject, I realized something: what makes a woman weak is not taking her husband’s name but taking her husband’s name unthinkingly, which I did not. And what sets women’s lib back a hundred years is not women changing their name but rather other women making them feel guilty for it.
What ticked me off about the Dutch study was not its findings but the interpretation of them. Many women are using this study as “proof” that women who change their names are “idiots”—obviously not committed to their careers or to feminism. One such woman, Emma Waverman, invokes women’s rights activist Lucy Stone, the first woman to keep her name legally after marriage.
What I find ironic in Miss Waverman’s position is that Lucy Stone, and the League that now bears her name, fought for women’s equal rights “to create, retain, modify and keep their own names”. Forcing women to keep their names (whether legally or through shaming) flies in the face of this right just as much as forcing women to change them.
I had the right to modify my name, and I did. That doesn’t make me an idiot; that doesn’t make me weak or submissive or less of a feminist. I made a thoughtful, rational decision that was the best one for me, and I support any woman’s right to do the same—whether that means changing her name or keeping it. Or hyphenating. Or inventing a whole new name!
The reaction this study should have provoked was not a smug self-satisfaction in women who kept their names or a surge of shame in those who didn’t. What it should have provoked was outrage that these perceptions are allowed to persist. What it should have provoked was a sense of unity among women—Miss, Ms. and Mrs. alike—to change the perception that women are more emotional and less intelligent, more caring and less ambitious, more dependent and less competent than men. What it should have provoked was a debate about the mechanisms that allow these female stereotypes to influence the employability and earning potential of women.
I am sad that what it has engendered instead is a revitalization of the “Ms. versus Mrs.” debate. As long as women keep blaming other women for not being good enough feminists, the inequalities that affect all women will continue. And as long as this study is taken to mean that women shouldn’t change their names, women will not have actually furthered their rights. Forcing us to keep our names for the sake of our careers is just the 21st century version of forcing us to change our names for the sake of our families. Or, as my granddad used to say, “Same sh*t, different pile.”
