I remember the first time I encountered the title ‘Ms’ in the signature of a nice-haired teacher at primary school, and finding it impossibly chic. It read as a sort of stubbornness: a reluctance to conform, or to define herself by her relationship to a man.
As I got older, the word Ms started to feel a little pretentious. But then, in my thirties, people I knew started getting married, and not only were their titles changing, but their surnames too. I felt discombobulated - at sea. I suddenly appreciated the importance of a name. Ms, as an option, once again made sense.
I’ll admit, I was surprised to learn that many women still changed their names. Surely we’d done away with this around the time we got the Pill, or the vote, or Madonna? But no. In the US, around 70% of women take their husband’s surname when they marry; in the UK, it’s closer to 90%.
The tradition dates back to the Middle Ages, when under ‘coverture’ - a legal doctrine in English common law - a woman's legal rights and identity were merged with her husband's upon marriage. Though the idea of ‘owning’ wives was scrapped over a hundred years ago, along with any legal requirement to take a man’s name, and many waves of feminism, the tradition still remains. What does that tell us about who we are now - and who we want to be?
When I was pregnant with my first child, it occurred to me that she would be expected to take her father’s surname. By the time I’d given birth, the idea that this baby - who was drawing actual blood from my nipple - would not take mine seemed preposterous. Luckily, my partner agreed. We briefly discussed combining our names, or cobbling together something double-barrelled, but nothing sounded right, so she took my name and that was that.
We had another child a few years later, and eventually decided to get married. One day, a friend asked - with only a drop of acidity - if I was going to succumb to the ‘patriarchal institution’ of marriage, then why not go all the way and take my partner’s name too? For a moment, I thought about it.
There are, of course, plenty of reasons why a woman might want to change her name. There are the big ones - wanting to disassociate herself from a difficult family, or establish herself as independent - and the smaller ones, like to escape a lifetime of light bullying due to a surname that sounds like ‘cock’.
