I am amazed at how many attractive, well educated successful women still suffer from pangs of anxiety about getting married . I don't mean the natural anxiety that goes with deciding to spend the rest of your life with a person but the old fashioned pangs:"when will i get married, Oh, god, when will i meet someone, oh no , i will be alone forever"pangs. To make matters worse, most women still take their spouse's last name. Since most woemn still see being married as a form of social status, it makes sense that they would emphasize hier name change without even thinking about what it all means. Taking a man's name is part of a patriarchial system of claiming a women as their property and becoming part of his family. She stripped of the identity that she has had all her life because of course historically the man's was more important. To take a man's name is to subscribe to this idea, whether you would like to admit or not. Most people will argue that it is only for the purpose of unifying the family once the children are born, but wouldn't the person having the child merit the honour of having her name heading the family unit? it would only make sense.
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I completely agree with the name thing. I just got married, and I have the greatest husband ever, who does not feel threatened or emasculated or undermined by my choice to keep my last name.
And I don't feel compelled to make any excuses or offer any justifications or explanations to anyone about why I made this choice.
While chatting with a nurse during a recent doctor visit, she told me that she's been engaged for a really long time (I can't remember exactly, but it was definitely more than 5 years). I asked her when she was getting married, and she said her fiance refuses to marry her until she agrees to take his last name. Gross.
On the other side of that, my husband's friend was asked by her future mother-in-law if she was going to take her future husband's name in a way that obviously indicated she thought it was ridiculous to keep her own name. The friend replied, "Well, I hadn't decided yet, but thanks for helping me make the choice to keep my maiden name." Awesome. (and by the way, what's with the "maiden" in "maiden name?" ugh.)
I kept my own last name when I got married (though my husband's grandparents still address everything as Mr. & Mrs. 'hubby's last name'). I like it. It is original (only 10 people in the US have it as a last name and I am related to all of them, and I've only found a few others overseas and they are related as well).
I had never liked the idea of changing my last name to begin with. A while before I got married though one of my professors talked about why she kept her last name (and went back to it after a hyphenating debacle). She said that she worked for her degree so why would she want her husband's name on it. She also talked about that for a little while she hyphenated the last name to help avoid confusion at school with her kids, but it ended up just causing more of a mess so she went back to her last name only.
My husband though swears that when we have kids he will change his last name to mine and if it isn't a legal nightmare we probably will. His reasoning is that he doesn't like his last name for one, and two that my family has acted more like a family to him (ie, being encouraging, welcoming, non-judgemental) than his own family.
I can't ever imagine changing my name. We actually had a rather interesting debate on this in an Ancient Egyptian bodies and persons lecture! About how our names can be such a bug part of our identity and how easily women were and are expected to change this so freely.
I know if I ever get married my name is staying with me!