When you’re asked to identify yourself to get a passport, or a free cup of coffee with your 10th purchase, the very first piece of information that will be required is not your blood type, fingerprint or DNA code. It is your name. Our names are the cornerstone of our identities. Away from the CSI lab, they are the single-most-significant identifying feature we have. To give up your name is to give up a key part of who you are.
But maybe not that key. In reality, our names are less fixed than those other identifying characteristics. You can, legally at least, call yourself just about anything you want.
Nowhere is this flexibility more evident than in the carryings-on that occur when two people cleave unto each other, officially creating a new family unit. The most common name change when people marry is still the one in which the woman gives up her birth surname – the quaintly termed “maiden” name, although these days she is almost certainly not a maiden – and takes a new surname.
Every year, thousands of women hand over this part of their identity to some bloke. Jane Bloggs marries Joe Blow and becomes Jane Blow. But Jane – and Joe, too – actually have many other options, and there are many reasons people adopt them.
The most obvious choice is the hyphenated double-barrelling of each party’s surname, which is why the Warriors rugby league team includes the likes of Roger Tuivasa-Sheck, Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad and Dallin Watene-Zelezniak, combinations adopted by their parents. And our current roster of MPs incudes Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer.
Hard data on name change patterns is not easy to find, but the hyphenating bug seems to have bitten in the 1980s as a feminist alternative to the traditional patriarchal absorption of a woman’s identity. If you’d put your money into hyphens back then, you’d have made a tidy profit by now.
But only if you’d invested in women hyphens. Men have been conspicuously reluctant to grow a pair of names. Often, even when Jane becomes Jane Bloggs-Blow, Joe will remain plain Joe Blow.
Mrs Denis Foot
Rarer these days is the once-common practice of replacing both parts of a woman’s name with her husband’s for official purposes, in which case Jane would receive correspondence addressed to Mrs Joe Blow.
The practice is not altogether extinct. Although her name always was, still is and always will be Sue Kedgley, the pioneering feminist, Green MP and all-round achiever reports that she still, occasionally, gets mail addressed to “Mrs Denis Foot”, who happens to be her husband.
A husband, back in the day, was not just a woman’s mate, he was her proprietor. As the 18th-century legal authority William Blackstone put it: “Husband and wife are one person in law [and] the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage.”
Kedgley has a firm historical grip on the relevance of name changing. “In terms of the early days of women’s liberation, a woman was a miss, and then you became a missus and took on her husband’s name,” she says. “It was seen as a huge triumph and relief when a woman got married, because that was her role in life. Most women were just so grateful to get married that they were only too thrilled to take a man’s name.”
Even in her circles. “When I went to a school reunion, it was so hard to work out who anyone was. They had all their names on, and then in brackets, ‘maiden name.’”
Kedgley and Foot belong to that subset of couples who keep their own names and give both to their offspring, in this case their son, Zac Kedgley-Foot.
A husband, back in the day, was not just a woman’s mate, he was her proprietor
There are cases where a couple will give one child the father’s surname and another the mother’s. Potential confusion as siblings go through life together is usually claimed as a reason not to take a his and hers option. Although, as Kedgley’s school reunion experience showed, there has never been any concern about Jane Bloggs disappearing and having her place taken by Jane Blow.
New dads Matt McEvoy-Roberts and Yi Zhang, who have twin daughters thanks to an egg donor and surrogate, also took the hyphenation option for their children.
Says McEvoy-Roberts: “My parents were both McEvoy-Roberts. I liked the double name but in practice the dash is an ongoing pain in the arse: passports, airports, online forms, logging into stuff where a real name is required, people trying to find me on lists, email address spelling …”
And yet, “our daughters’ names are Carmen Xi McEvoy-Zhang and Lucia Yu McEvoy-Zhang. We went for McEvoy-Zhang because, although it doesn’t remove the dash issue, it removes other travel issues, such as if Yi travels alone with the girls and officials accuse him of kidnapping: ‘Why do they look different? Why don’t they share a surname?’” Bearing in mind you’d have to be 12 kinds of insane to kidnap twins, it probably wasn’t a risk worth taking.
For a woman to keep her surname can be to make a statement about her priorities – and to risk social and family pressure, just as it is for a man who hews to the status quo, although this is less frequently acknowledged.
For many people, the shared surname is a crucial part of what makes a family a family. Says Moeata Keil, sociology lecturer at the University of Auckland, it’s about “creating family cohesion, so everybody in the family has the same name. Even if there’s a resistance against the patriarchal convention, it’s thinking about that collective family identity, so that when you go to the schools to talk to teachers, there’s a clear connection between you and your children.”
It’s so easy to swim down the river of social norms, and it takes real attention to those norms to do something that feels right...
Marriage celebrant Kay Gregory agrees that’s often a thing. “Lots of couples these days have already had children, so they all want to have the same name.”
But while it’s unusual for the Bloggs name to take precedence, it is not written that the Blow name must. There are even more alternatives. Leadership development consultant Leanne Holdsworth and her husband Greg Holdsworth, a designer, gave the matter much thought and discussion and came up with a “deliberately” non-patriarchal alternative. Her original surname was Jones and his was Horrie. Together, they decided to ditch those names and adopt Holdsworth, Greg’s middle name that harked back to a forebear.
“It’s so easy to swim down the river of social norms, and it takes real attention to those norms to do something that feels right,” says Leanne, who found Greg by putting an ad in a newspaper, outlining what she was looking for in a partner. “I did a short list and phone-interviewed some and met some. I met Greg, and two weeks later he asked me to marry him. Six months later we got married, and that was 30 years ago.”
For both (or neither) party to change their name is indeed rare, but it’s also fair and “I wouldn’t have had it that he changed his name to mine. It was absolutely a matter of what could we create together, rather than what does one of us take on?”
Sticklers for tradition
For an undeniably large number of women, it seems, changing your surname is actually an important part of getting married. “It’s the tradition, it’s what you do,” says Keil. “Sometimes people haven’t even put a lot of thought into it. It’s just what your parents did, what people around you do.”
Looking back over “thousands” of knot-tings, celebrant Gregory says most brides are “quite emphatic about wanting to change their name. I have often thought that it might change, and it just hasn’t. A lot of brides are quite disappointed that when they sign [the register] on their wedding day they can’t use their married name and have to sign in their maiden name.”
She acknowledges that even she unconsciously sticks to the double standard. “At the end of the ceremony, often they like to be introduced as Mr or Mrs Smith. So I always say are you changing your name, but to the bride, never to the groom, which is silly.”
Statistically, that’s the time-saving choice because Gregory can remember only one case of a man changing his surname “and that was because he was estranged from his family”.
Male taboo
Apart from patriarchal tradition, Keil sees other pressures being brought to bear: “It’s having to be accountable to your family, to broader society, to the people around you.” A possible rift between a man changing his name and his family would be highly likely. Isn’t their name good enough for him?
“People might ask, why does it matter?” says Keil. “The fact that it does cause a rift means it obviously matters.” Some reasons for a male name-change are more acceptable than others: “If the woman has no brothers, it gives the couple legitimate grounds.” That name, in that line of the family, is being preserved thanks to the male’s willingness to make what is a giant sacrifice for a man, but apparently a small step for womankind.
Gregory has noticed another recent trend: “An increasing number of women say they’re going to take their husband’s name but keep their maiden name for work.”
“I have not changed my name at work,” says Keil. “And that’s because in the academic space, when you have already published, you would have a track history, you would have created a profile and network, especially if you’ve gained a profile overseas. To change your name would be reinventing yourself. It would be confusing.”
Cultural factors also come into play, says Keil, especially if “it’s a last name that’s invested with a particular cultural identity. I know an Irish man with a Māori wife, and because they live in New Zealand, they’ve kept her last name because of the connection to this land. And they want the children to have a really strong identity with their Māori culture.”
The choice is more acceptable because “the man is Irish, and he lives in New Zealand. So he’s less accountable to society.” For a man to take on a woman’s name, there has to be more of a “rational process” around it.
It never even crossed my mind that I would change my name. I can’t understand why quite a large number of women are still doing it.
Divorce also often prompts people to rethink their surnames, but only a minority of women revert to their original names. “Part of keeping the name is that their children have that name,” says Keil. “If there’s no children, the question of what do I do with my last name is less loaded. But when you have children, and if you think about all of the emotions that are there in a divorce, if a woman disconnected herself from the last name it’s another loss of that time or that connection.”
Family sensitivities played a role for Shirlie Parkinson, who changed her surname to Carruthers when she married for the first time but is now Parkinson again. She has been with her partner, Len Zeier, for 42 years. She reverted to Parkinson when the first of their two children was born, partly because Ōpōtiki, where she lives, is a small town, and when she had her first baby, “I walked out of the maternity annex and this old man said, ‘Oh, Mrs. Carruthers, I didn’t realise that you’d had a baby.’
“I hadn’t had children to Barry Carruthers and I didn’t think it was fair to my ex in-laws if people thought my children were their grandchildren.” Her offspring, for the record, are Parkinson-Zeiers, so no room for confusion there.
Meanwhile, the double standard continues to prevail. “Why,” says Kedgley, “is it considered so horrific for a man to be expected to give up his identity and take on a wife’s name, and it’s supposed to be normal and acceptable for a woman to lose her identity upon marriage and take on his name?
“To me, it’s just completely irrelevant. It never even crossed my mind that I would change my name. I can’t understand why quite a large number of women are still doing it.”
Making the change
There is no comprehensive data kept on the number or type of name changes and how many people keep, change, hyphenate or invent new ones. But we do know that doing any one of those things officially is relatively straightforward.
According to Russell Burnard, registrar-general of births, deaths and marriages, you don’t usually have to do anything special if you want to change your name in New Zealand after you get married or have a civil union. You can keep your last name, take your spouse’s surname, hyphenate or use a combination of both your last names with a space in between. Or you can both adopt an entirely new name.
“If you want to change your last name, you don’t usually need to complete any forms or go through a formal process, and there are no rules about using your own or your married surname interchangeably,” says Burnard.
“For example, you may not decide to use your married surname until it’s time to renew your driver licence or passport, which may be years after you marry or have a civil union. Or you might choose to use your own last name in some places and your married surname in others.”
If you want to have that new name nailed down with no possibility of anyone questioning it, “you can do so by completing an application to register a name change by statutory declaration with Births, Deaths and Marriages. To be eligible to legally change your name in New Zealand, you need to be either a NZ citizen or entitled to live here indefinitely and be over 18.”
One intriguing piece of name trivia the Department of Internal Affairs did mention in passing was that in 2023, 12 people changed their name 10 times or more.