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Comment by pbiggar | Hacker News Reader

Completely off topic, but I wish this could have just said "my wife uses her own last name" or something like that. It reads like your wife needs an excuse to keep her last name, which I'm sure isn't the case, but is indicative of the weird - slightly misogynistic - society we're in where the default is for women to give up their names at marriage.

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Descriptively I think that's still the case, at least on average: most women who have no specific "reason" to keep their name adopt their husband's name, while rates of not doing so are much higher if there's some reason it would be actively advantageous not to change names (e.g. an academic with a publication record under her name).

Among my circle of friends, even among academics, the tendency towards changing seems to be fairly high; those who got married late-ish with a significant publication record didn't switch, because it would seriously dilute their name recognition / citation counts / etc., but those who got married in grad school with 2-3 existing publications have all switched. Not entirely sure whether it's tradition or personal reasons or family or what.

(US-centric point of view:)

Most women like that part of getting married. They get excited about it. They want their kids to have the same last name as both parents and they want to share the name of their husband. Please try to not turn it into some male domination thing, as so many discussions on here needlessly turn to that. It's like the HN version of "all discussions eventually lead to Hitler," or however that goes.

We're both off-topic, but since you chose to go there...

My wife was 18 when we got married. She wasn't "well known". She wasn't a feminist. But she kept her last name and it has never been a problem - except for PayPal.

Our kids have her last name as their middle name and my last name as their last name for convenience - mainly the school's convenience.

Personally I hope some day we go to a system where you turn 18 and pick the name you want. I've known at least two couples where when they got married they didn't choose either name, but took a name for "them". I personally would like to see more of this, but then I'm a bit of a romantic.

> My wife was 18 when we got married.

o_O

That really isn't unheard of, you know. It isn't common, but it happens often enough that you shouldn't be that surprised. If you are shocked by people marrying at 18 I recommend you avoid looking into teen pregnancy rates.

Many early marriages fail (but then again so do many late ones, so that generalism might be based on confirmation bias) but some people are mature enough to have a solid relationship and life plan by that point so getting married early works for them.

In my limited anecdotal observations, I see the same as you. That does not mean that it isn't a "male domination thing" (at an ingrained-into-the-core-of-society level).

I simply wish we didn't feel like we have to excuse women keeping their own name, and hope that one day it will simply be the default.

I trust that the billions of women world 'round who practice this know in their heart-of-hearts that they are not being dominated by adopting their husband's last name. Yours is something of an extreme point of view, IMO.

The point is not that women adopting their husband's names is misogynistic but rather that the need to excuse women who don't is misogynistic.

A wife taking the husband's name is still the norm here. I think that some people feel they need to explain why they didn't so that other (more judgmental) people don't just label them as "weird" or "femi-nazis" or any of the other disparaging labels that people put on others when they don't have the same opinions and ideals. I think this change is a slow process and will not have 100% acceptance. But I have no doubt that the time will come when that choice will no longer be questioned.

My wife doesn't need an excuse and I didn't offer one. I provided an explanation for this discussion lest you think we were recent immigrants or had some other cultural norm different from mainstream US. In fact, we're about as mainstream as you can get in this wonderfully diverse country, and no one I know bats an eye about us having different names. No one except PayPal and that one grumpy old Cuban* in south Florida who wanted some proof of our marital status for a rental car contract.

* and before I'm branded racist for pointing out his nationality without relevance, I'll add that he was the one who made a long case about how things were done properly in his country and how I lacked machismo for allowing this sad state of affairs. There was much wagging of fingers and clucking of tongues about this "American way". Maybe he works for PayPal now.

Male hegemony is not the same thing as misogyny.

And a societal norm of women taking their husbands name is neither hegemony nor misogyny, it's just what it is.

Not everything is a kind of domination. Especially if it doesn't involve people doing stuff they don't want.

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