
What’s in a Name? To Keep or
Not to Keep Your Maiden Name
Considerations for Keeping or
Changing Your Maiden Name
By Maggie Yates | January 30, 2025
Read more of our 2025 Wedding Guide here.
I took a survey of my female friends — women from a variety of backgrounds, ages, education levels, incomes, careers, and political leanings — to learn why women keep or change their maiden name when they marry. I secretly feared a barrage of thoughtless toeing of the patriarchal line; instead, I was delighted by a list of considerations, both for and against a name change, that are varied and well-contemplated and certainly have a place in contemporary life. Whatever your choice, the important aspect of this tradition is that you do have a choice — so pick the option best for and most authentic to you and your lifestyle.
Common reasons women take their husband’s surname in the Western marriage tradition are simply that it is the tradition, or that a single name reflects the family unit, especially with children, or they simply like their husband’s name better, or finally, they had no real attachment to their maiden name, so they shrugged and signed on the line.
But times are changing, and women choosing to keep their maiden name, if only for professional purposes, is trending upward.
Some women choose to keep their name based on a feminist point of view that a woman is as equally worthy of her own surname as a man. In this school of thought, the name change insinuates female subordination, as it signifies the woman as exchanged property from father to husband. Pragmatically, women are more aware of their digital footprint in terms of their career, their branding, their registered accomplishments, and events or achievements in which they are tagged and recognized.
On average, women today are getting married closer to age 30 than they did in 1960. They are now spending their early adulthood on education and career building. By the time they marry, their birth name may already be established professionally, so a name change risks making a woman disappear. Consider search engines, AI, and name recognition: If Susan Jones suddenly becomes Susan Brown, her academic records and professional career records are invisible to a search engine — which is a problem for Ms. Brown if she’s applying for something based on the profile of Susan Jones.
This also includes women who have developed a personal brand. Changing their name, at least professionally, might bring confusion and brand identity crisis. In this vein, women are opting to keep their brand identity intact by either keeping their name or separating their personal and professional lives. She can be Susan Brown to the neighbors and the PTA, but still be Susan Jones, LLC, to the followers and customers of her radical acceptance neo-sorceress podcast and vegan-leather celestial ornamentation jewelry line.
Other common reasons women keep their maiden names are a connection to their own family line, or, they change their name to escape being associated with their own family. However, that doesn’t always work. One woman changed her name to avoid being associated with an (at-the-time) notorious celebrity — only to take a name that would be associated with an even worse celebrity 20 years later. Thems the breaks!
Of course, names can be hyphenated or combined to create an entirely new last name. I’ve never seen a DMV agent more annoyed than in Oakland, 2010, when the “create a new name” fad was having a moment. Newlyweds attempted, in vain, to explain their brand-new invented name for their new driver’s licenses, and the salty agent at window four was having none of it.
Society is being dragged toward gender egalitarianism, and one day soon, women are going to start asking their fiancés, “Why don’t you take my name?”
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