My husband and I have been married for almost 18 months. I think that means we’re still newlyweds.
I know we still have a lot to learn about married life. It’s not easy blending two big personalities together into one harmonious couple… but we make it work.
Much of what I’m learning about marriage is how to be both an independent feminist and a loving wife.
Luckily I already knew before the wedding that you can be a feminist even if you don’t keep your maiden name. You can totally change your last name and still be a feminist.
I’m a feminist. I didn’t keep my maiden name.
But I didn’t change my last name either.
If a woman doesn’t change her last name upon marriage, she does not keep her maiden name.
She keeps her last name.
That’s it.
Period.
A woman’s last name only becomes a “maiden name” (which is still an archaic term thanks to a patriarchal society) if she changes her last name upon marriage.
Did my husband keep his “bachelor name” when we got married? Saying that is ridiculous. So why do people keep talking about women keeping their “maiden names” when they get married?
My birth certificate reads Brita Marie Long.
All my important legal documents have the same name on it.
For the first 26 years or so of my life, no one ever asked me for my “maiden name.” If someone needed to know my legal name for whatever reason, they asked for my first, middle, and last name. No one ever asked me for my first, middle, and maiden name.
My parents gave me my first, middle, and last name. My parents decided together what to name me. They also decided together what to name both my twin brother and my younger brother. If my brothers’ surname is just their surname, then why can’t my surname be just my surname?
My name is the same today as it was two years ago, before Dan even proposed to me. If my name wasn’t my “maiden name” then, it’s not my “maiden name” now.
And yet somehow, even professional publications and journalists can’t manage to figure this out.
From The Chicago Tribune: A bride-to-be asks about keeping her maiden name
From The New York Times: Maiden Names, on the Rise Again
From Time: Women Keeping Their Maiden Names More Often, Report Finds
Granted, some dictionaries still define maiden name as “the name given to a girl upon birth.” But since we no longer define marriage as a transfer of property from a woman’s father to her husband, I think we’re way past due for updating our ideas of women’s surnames.
I love what Anne Theriault says about this topic in “Stop calling it my maiden name.”
So why is the term “maiden name” not just incorrect but also totally problematic? Well, because it’s based on several outdated assumptions. First of all, there’s the idea that a woman is not an autonomous person but rather a thing belongs to a man, and her last name signifies which man she belongs to; until she marries, she belongs to her father, and then after she marries, she belongs to her husband. Referring to a last name as a “maiden name” reinforces the idea that it’s a transitory type of name — not a woman’s real last name, but rather just the name she keeps until she finally fulfills her lady-destiny and lands a man. Second of all, there’s all kinds of weird purity bullshit happening here. We’re basically referring to the last name a woman is given at birth as her virgin name, the implication being that she won’t have sex until she’s married, at which point she will take her husband’s name…
It’s pretty telling that there’s no male equivalent to the term maiden name. This is because men have always been considered people, and therefore have always been entitled to their last names — unlike women, who traditionally only ever get to borrow a last name from whichever man she has the closest relationship to. People often don’t want to admit that last names are a form of showing ownership, and while I get that we don’t legally use them in this way anymore, there are still a lot of weird vestiges from the time when women were considered to be less than human.
I really just want to quote almost everything Anne says in her article. I highly encourage you to go read the entire piece. And I’m totally with her that I want people to stop saying my last name is my maiden name.
Kate Tuttle at Dame Magazine writes with equal persuasion and brilliance in “Let’s Set ‘Maiden’ Name Out to Sea – Forever.” She critiques the article in The New York Times that I linked above.
Let’s start with the Times’ use of the outdated, thoroughly sexist, actually-kind-of-offensive-if-you-think-about-it term “maiden name.” The word itself—maiden—is an old one, carrying a constellation of meaning: young girl, unmarried girl, virgin. Its meaning of “doing something for the first time” is most commonly applied to non-human entities—we hear of a ship’s maiden voyage, a horse’s maiden race. But when applied to people, it reminds us of one thing: that marriage as an institution once demanded a virgin bride who was handed from her father’s house to her husband’s, and that the name she had worn since birth was discarded along with her virginity upon the occasion of her wedding day.
American women have (mostly) kicked coverture laws to the curb. Isn’t it time we did the same thing with so-called maiden names?
Further Reading:
My Husband Didn’t Take My Last Name
The Question No One Asks My Husband
Why My Husband & I Did Premarital Counseling Before He Proposed
The Perfect Wedding Dress for This Feminist Bride
Somehow it’s just now hitting me the purity implications of calling it a “maiden” name. How archaic.
It’s really weird and somewhat disturbing to me the number of holdovers we have from pretty messed-up values. Like I’ve stopped using the word “gyp” once I realized it’s a derogatory derivative from the Romani.
On that note, why do so many websites use “mother’s maiden name” as a security question? My mom’s name is part of my last name (even now, after I got married and changed my name) and I continually find the assumption that your mother’s maiden name is so obscure as to be “secure” insulting.
Luckily I no longer get that question, or it’s one option among many. It’s pretty common for parents to pass down maiden names as middle or even first names, even in a family where the wife took the husband’s last name. So that hasn’t been a “secure” question in a long time.
Agreed! I’ve even seen “grandmother’s maiden name.” Just so weird.
Love this! I hate the term maiden name. I changed my last name after getting married but I don’t think of my maiden name my maiden name, I think of it as my name. It was the name I was given at birth and even though I dropped it, it is still my name and a part of me.
Exactly! It’s your birth name. It’s still a part of your history. It’s weird for it to become a “maiden name” if you change it, instead of remaining your birth name.
I hadn’t even thought of the term “maiden name” in years (except when I see the security question options). I’ve been pleased that everyone has been framing the question to me as keeping my name or changing it. Hilariously, we received several checks made out to Mr. & Mrs. T – which I don’t really get since it’s not like my name would have changed immediately after marriage anyway.
Hopefully your bank won’t give you issues about depositing the checks. Our bank is cool as long as one name is correct. I’ve heard stories of other banks giving couples hell if both names don’t match up exactly.
What if we call a man’s name-before-marriage a “maiden name” too, in the ridiculously rare cases where a man changes his hame at marriage? Would that make the word ok?
I think you can refer to a custom without declaring it to be the right way to do things. “Maiden name” accurately describes the custom currently in place, unfortunately.
I think I made it clear that I acknowledge the current custom in this line. “A woman’s last name only becomes a “maiden name” (which is still an archaic term thanks to a patriarchal society) if she changes her last name upon marriage.”
I didn’t change my last name, which means my last name is just my last name. It’s not my maiden name. A maiden name only exists if you had a different legal surname that you changed upon marriage.
Language doesn’t work that way. We speak of raw tomatoes and not of raw mangoes, because tomatoes often are cooked and mangoes aren’t. But if a tomato is eaten raw, we still call it raw, even though that particular tomato doesn’t have a later cooked state to contrast its raw state with. College students working toward their bachelor’s degree are undergrads, even if they never go to grad school. It wouldn’t make sense to call them that, if there were no such thing as grad school. But given that there is, the word’s applicability doesn’t depend on whether the individual in question eventually attends it.
“Maiden name” refers to a name that a girl or woman is expected to change if she gets married, regardless of whether she ever does. We should change the expectation. If an individual just chooses to do otherwise, as you and I both did, the expectation is still there. We’re part of a culture, even when we don’t like certain aspects of it.
The term is not archaic. The expectations it describes are still in place: almost all women who marry still change their names, and almost no men do.
I sort of feel like you’re beating a dead horse with all the my name/his name, last name/maiden name posts lately.
With few exceptions, I blog 3-5 times a week. In 2015, I’ve published ~106 posts, plus 2 guest posts, but feel free to check my math for me since I counted them rather quickly. 3 of those posts have been regarding last names. The 1st was in February, the 2nd was in May, and I wrote this in August.
If you think committing less than 3% of my writing to a single topic is “beating a dead horse,” I’m not sure why you read my blog. I do Monthly Goals every single month. I write a LOT about marriage/relationships in general. I do way more fashion posts than just 3% of my overall posts.
Also, why you might not like this topic, my stats suggest my other readers love it. My all-time most popular post is “My Husband Didn’t Take My Last Name.” “The Question No One Asks My Husband” is my 5th most popular post. This take on maiden names hasn’t been up as long, but it’s made the top 10 for this quarter already.
And you know, as long as people keep sending me mail to “Mrs. Daniel Fleck,” I’m going to keep reminding people that’s not my name.
I love how you break down the description of a maiden name. You’re so right, before a woman gets married, no one asks for a maiden name. I love this post. Thanks for sharing at Inspiration Thursday! Have a great Labor Day weekend!
Like, I get that we need a word to specify prior legal names, and in America, the vast majority of the time, that refers to a married woman’s birth name. But I’m just tired of people claiming MY name is a maiden name just because I got married!
I will have a great Labor Day weekend–my husband and I are going to Ohio!!!!! I hope you enjoy yours too. 😀
I have no strong feelings really for or against the term maiden name, but for those who have changed/do change their last names, what is the term you recommend for calling a former (not current) last name? “Birth surname”–that might be a good one, clear and understandable. It’s a little hard to enact a worldwide change in vocabulary, but it does happen upon occasion. I have no fondness for my birth surname or my current surname, and neither one makes me feel like a part of any group, but I can appreciate that some people actually care about their names.
I think birth name or birth surname would work just fine, depending on the country/language customs.
Luckily we don’t totally need to enact a worldwide change. In many countries, like in Quebec, Greece, and much of the Spanish-speaking world, women don’t change their names upon marriage. Thus there is no such thing as a “maiden name” to try and change.
In other parts of the world, a gender-neutral term for “birth surname” already exists. In France, for example, men and women legally keep their “nom de famille” upon marriage, but are also legally allowed to use their “nom de usage” in some circumstances. It’s kind of like how some American women will use their husband’s name socially while maintaining their name legally, only codified into French law. Only a few older people still colloquially refer to the “nom de jeune fille.”
I do really care about my name (obviously). Thank you for appreciating that! It honestly hurts my feelings when people continue to ignore my stated wishes about my name.
Had never thought of this before but darn it you’re right – it’s just your name!
And as you point out you can be a feminist and change your name.
I am getting married in March and we have talked a lot about what I am going to do with my last name and I am still just very unsure and on the fence. I am one of two and we are both women so after us, our family’s last name is pretty much “done”. I however am already getting comments about my “maiden name” and it is annoying. it makes me feel elderly and I just don’t really like it! so, preach girl preach!
I thought about this too when I got married, but then I didn’t want my children to have a different last name than me, or to have to hyphenate both our crazy hard last names. So I took my “former last name” as my middle name.
I mean… there’s no rule that says kids have to take the father’s last name if the parents have different last names… I totally understand wanting to share a last name with your kids, though. Any future spawn of Dan and me will have two last names. 😉
Which is totally fine when your last name is Long. But not fine when your last name is LITERALLY LONG. I traded an 11-character Russian name to an 8-character German name. I think having to make a kid use both would be cruel and unusual punishment. LOL
OMG, Russian AND German. Y’all should have just taken the name Cookies and been done with it! 😉