Reply to Is it weird that I don’t want to change my last name?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There are some black women who change their names to their husband's name and give their children their husband's name because of the stereotype of baby mamas/kids of out wedlock etc. White women weren't usually painted as whores who had children without benefit of marriage when they keep their names, and as such have had "options" when it came to changing their name or keeping their name.

My mother would never have considered keeping her last name and ever having someone think she was unmarried when she had us. I have two last names and so do my kids because we wanted them to have my name and my husband's name and, if I am honest, the baby mama thing was there in my mind, too. My children will likely decide to do something different than we did. Times, they are a'changin'. [/quote]

I'm in academe where it is actually UNCOMMON for women to change their name. My field leans very left/feminist and authored papers are a significant part of your professional identity, women just keep their names, use terms like "partners",etc. . That said, the black women in my program who later got married (including myself) have used are husband's last name, at least socially. I have not seen this with a single one of the white women who were in our grad program and later married. Having a different name from your mother in the community in which I was raised wasn't because your mother had her own professional identity or progressive views about retaining "her" name. It was just understood that she wasn't married to your father. I imagine this may have been the experience of some of my black female colleagues. To be clear many black women academics don't change their name but name changing is much more common than among our white counterparts.

I actually legally changed my name but that also had to do with my relationship with my father. I wanted a new start in a symbolic sense. [/quote]

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