In the name of love

Feminists fought hard for married women to have the right to keep their maiden names. So why are many young women sticking with tradition? CATHRIN SCHAER reports.

In a move that is, to some, more shocking than publishing pictures of herself naked brandishing a whip, Madonna has taken her husband's name.

Throughout her unions with actor Sean Penn and father-of-her-child Carlos Leon, this second-generation feminist icon has never felt the need to adopt her partner's surname. But now she seems to have decided to go all traditional on us.

And there's been a veritable rash of other celebrities doing the same - Posh Spice became Victoria Beckham, fellow Spice girl Mel C was Mel G (albeit for a short time) and United States Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was forced to drop the Rodham some time ago.

It's been happening in New Zealand, too. In private, television presenter Petra Bagust takes her husband's name, in public TV3 newsreader Carolyn Ryan has recently turned into a Robinson, and Silver Fern netballer Tania Nicholson has just become a Dalton.

So what is going on? Is this the rise of a new conservatism? Is feminism officially over?

Or perhaps things aren't really changing. Although Madonna has only just decided to take her new hubby's moniker, American Demographics magazine reported in 1994 that 90 per cent of women getting married chose to adopt their husbands' names.

The remaining 10 per cent chose some other option. These include a double-barrelled name, both taking the woman's maiden name, or coming up with a new name - this could be an amalgamation of the two surnames, say, Fisch plus Flynn equals Flisch - or something completely different. Of all of those, only 2 per cent of women retain their maiden names.

So why all the fuss? Probably because a century ago all of the latter would have been illegal.

Some of the first surnames are found in William the Conqueror's 11th-century Domesday Book. These were required, says American political theorist Jackie Stevens, author of the 1999 book Reproducing the State, to codify inheritance rules and gather tax revenue.

"Inheritance laws and surnames - it's all about compensating for men's inability to give birth," Stevens contends. "The surname remains the only way of showing legitimacy. Without it, there's no certainty that the kid has a legal father."

When a man and woman married in the Middle Ages they became a single monetary unit in the eyes of the kingdom and were identified by one name - his. Over time this evolved into a legal concept called "couverture," under which a woman's identity simply merged with her husband's.

Along the way she lost her legal right to own property or enter into contracts. An extract from an 1854 pamphlet on "Married Women and the Law" summarises "couverture" like this: "A woman's body belongs to her husband; she is in his custody, and he can enforce his right by a writ of habeus corpus. What was her personal property before marriage, becomes absolutely her husband's, and he may assign or dispose of them at his pleasure whether he and wife live together or not.

"A wife's chattels become her husband's. The legal custody of children belongs to the father. During the lifetime of a sane father, the mother has no rights over her children, except a limited power over infants, and the father may take them from her and dispose of them as he thinks fit. A wife cannot bring legal actions unless the husband's name is joined."

You can see why the original feminists got a little annoyed at being forced into such an arrangement. For them it was about the loss of their own identity and the confiscation of their rights.

One such suffragette was Lucy Stone, an American woman who refused to take her husband's name in 1855. Her actions inspired the 1921 formation of the Lucy Stone League, an organisation dedicated to enabling women to keep their birth names after marriage, as well as speaking out on other women's rights issues.

Interestingly, this organisation still exists today, and on their website (www.lucystoneleague.org) they continue to argue passionately that women keep their own names after marrying.

Their protests are not as out-of-date as you might think. They point to the fact that as recently as 1971 the United States Supreme Court upheld an Alabama statute that automatically changed a woman's legal surname to that of her husband upon marriage, and that well into the second half of last century many American states still refused to issue driver's licences or credit cards to married women in their maiden names.

It wasn't even until 1979 that the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women called for women to be given equality in the right to choose a family name.

The Lucy Stone-ers still use inflammatory terms such as "Name Abandonment," saying that this continues to be a "powerful instance of sex discrimination" that sends this message: "women's identities are not worth as much as men's."

However, Madonna and others have obviously not been paying any of that much attention. Despite all the history, they still want to take their husbands' names. Why? Mrs Ritchie wasn't available for comment, but local netballer Tania Dalton says she changed her name because she's basically "a traditional kind of girl."

"I knew I was always going to get married in a church and I always thought I would take my husband's name," she says. "I think it's all part and parcel of getting married."

Newsreader Carolyn Robinson thought long and hard about taking her husband-to-be's last name. She considered other options - hyphenation, him taking her surname - but came to the following conclusion.

"It was just something I wanted to do. And I really like the idea of having the same last name because it feels like we're a real family unit."

"Professionally, it's also been acceptable to change my name - I'm still at a fairly early stage of my career. Sure, sometimes it does feel a little bit archaic," she notes, "but I think times have changed a lot. I think what feminism has done for women is fabulous and I don't feel like I am undermining that at all.

"There's no question that by taking his name, my husband becomes my boss or something. I'm just madly in love, that's all."

Other New Zealand women give further reasons - no confusion, no double-barrelled names, and it's easier for the children. Additionally, for a couple where one or both has a family history of divorce, sometimes losing the name of the parent who left your family can be worth celebrating.

"As I see it I've always had the name of a person who didn't love me," says one woman; "now I'm swapping it for the name of a person who adores me - and that makes sense to me."

Times have changed and, rather than taking women's rights away after marriage, the law now tries to ensure that partners in a relationship have equal rights when it comes to property and children.

Whether they're right or wrong, most of the women in their 20s and early 30s who were interviewed for this story echoed Robinson's sentiments - they didn't see taking their husband's name as symbolic of anything except their new union. It just made them feel like they were "really married."

For many women, what it seems to come down to is plain old hearts'n'flowers, Mills-and-Boon-style romance. Remember how little girls at school used to try out their first names with the surname of whichever playground paramour they happened to have a crush on? It signals a social transformation and figures right up there with the bridal fantasy and wondering what your kids will look like.

Then again, there probably weren't too many little boys reinventing their surnames at playtime.

Says Briton Sarah Mather, who is 44 and on her second marriage, "It took women centuries to achieve the right to a full legal and cultural identity independent of their husbands. To give that up because of some soft-focus, sentimental fantasy about "happy ever after" seems to me the worst kind of bad faith. [Taking your husband's name] still feels a little bit retrograde to me."

Professor Maureen Molloy, of the Women's Studies programme at the University of Auckland, puts it more delicately. "I think it's a small symptom of increasing neo-conservatism and that it fits in with other trends, such as a rising number of marriages. I also think many of those young women [who take their husbands' names] tend to be unaware of the gains that feminism has made on their behalf."

Molloy also points out that although Madonna has taken Ritchie's name, she's still known worldwide as Madonna, she's financially independent and probably has a pre-nuptial agreement that's tighter than a Jean-Paul Gaultier corset with pointy breast cones.

In Britain, New Zealand and many other countries, common law says that you're free to adopt your partner's name, or not, as you wish.

However, you can't help but wonder what Madonna would have done if she had been getting hitched in Japan. There, couples are required by law to have only one surname after they marry; and traditionally this has been the male's name because of an emphasis on patrilineage.

All of which has seen modern Japanese couples fighting for something called "fufu bessei" - the practice of retaining one's original name after marriage - to be incorporated into their civil code. Women there say that changing their names upon marriage still makes them feel like little more than adjuncts of their husbands - they cite disadvantages for professional women and a loss of identity. One imagines many young Japanese women, like Madonna, would like to have the choice.