Try leaving Kentucky sometime. |
Mmmm... yes, I come from a blue collar family and consider myself blue collar too. What point are you trying to make? |
In the distant past everyone changed their name. In the late 80s and 90s most professional women did not change their name. Sometime in the early 2000/2010s the trend went back to changing names. I think the trend is very much to change the name. At a big law firm and almost every married female associate changing name. But there is no wrong or right answer. Up to you. I will say DW did not change her name. I did not and do not care. Not an issue. As we had a family it was a pain in the ass that she did not have the same name. This is over the last 20 years. Logistically it has screwed up flights , using miles for flights, permission to pick the kids up. All can be worked out and I would say less of an issue now that 15 years ago but a giant pain in the ass anyway. DW regretted not changing her name but was too far in to really do anything about it. |
If you don’t change your name, HomeGoods legally cannot sell you a “Live, Laugh, Love” sign 😢 |
I’ve been married for 20 years, kept my name, and have literally never had this happen. How would it even screw up a flight? You have to buy tickets under your legal name. |
Yeah, I've never understood that either. US has a large hispanic population and a large number of unmarried couples with kids, how do people think they travel or pick up their children from school? |
Also, wtf school would not have both parents’ names on file? |
Many hispanics actually get married. They tend to be more conservative and religious. |
According to DCUM, they just go by last name, hence the confusion. I guess I con go to any school and pick up any random kid as long we have the same last name. |
I meant that in hispanic cultures women tend to keep their last name after marriage. |
There are all sorts of cultures that don’t change their names. In fact, in a lot of Western Europe it’s *illegal* to for a woman to change her name. Quite a lot of this actually traces its history back to feudalism and aristocratic hierarchy (aristocrats when they married change their official titles but the little people stay the same). The patriarchy isn’t really in play.
In the British tradition, as well as most Scandinavian cultures, and much of Germany (though Germany is a mishmash culturally and thus there’s no singular German tradition on much of anything) names change and it carried forward to the U.S. The reason for this is likely pragmatic because record keeping was more straightforward. In the western world, if you look at the countries that have families organized by having 1 consistent last name carried down by the man also have a better organized administrative state when it comes to wills, property lines, tax collection, and many other things. The biggest outlier here is the Netherlands where it’s illegal to change names and they have a very efficient administrative state. But it’s not really directly about the patriarchy except insofar as much of everything can be traced back to the “patriarchy”. Plenty of patriarchal societies (Italy, France, Spain, Greece) don’t change names. In certain countries, it’s common. My entire family on all sides traces its roots back 100% to countries with that tradition, so it’s been the tradition in my family. Who cares? Not everyone has to do it the same way. What someone else does doesn’t bother me and I’d appreciate what I do not bother you. |
Yes, but in traditional Hispanic culture, women do not change their name when they get married. |
The patriarchal aspect of this tradition isn't the expectation that the family has a single name, but the fact that the name needs to come from the man. Sure, plenty of patriarchal culture don't follow that custom, but it doesn't mean the custom is patriarchal. |
Then everything is patriarchal. The fact that hundreds of years ago, a custom was created to be administratively simple and that custom favored the men’s’ names is…. unsurprising. The name doesn’t “need” to come from the man. But it can come from the woman, the man, or be made up. You don’t get any other choices. So when you see the man’s name, it was one of the 3 available choices. Maybe it’s not a choice you would make but what someone else does is none of your business. It’s not inherently patriarchal, like so many things that are over simplified these days, it can be this, but it can also be something else. |
Yes, I'm aware of that. The point is that it's the man's name that's chosen most of the time. There are more women changing to a man's name than there are women keeping their own, and less than 5% of men take a woman's. The trend is clearly gendered. And yes, it's none of my business, but I'm not forcing others to behave against their wishes, I'm just posting my opinion in a public forum where the question about name changes was asked. |