Reply #80: This is the same argument that I heard in the the 1970s

[Gormy Cuss]

In our culture children have surnames defined by their father's. That is a separate custom involving definition of naming practices at birth. These are generally ways to define clan. Historically the practice of women abandoning their surnames for their spouses' was tied to symbolic and legal changes in her status, passing her and her property over to her husband or his clan. One can argue that since women have more balanced legal rights after marriage that it's now largely symbolic.

The modern argument is that it defines the family to have everyone use the same surname. Sure, except there are many families where that isn't the case. It's no longer that unusual for children to have different surnames from one of their parents, so families are defined in our culture without everyone having the last name.

Here's the thing about 'maiden' names. Boys grow up with the expectation that this will always be their surname, their identity. Girls get the message from a very early age that it's a placeholder and at some point they will be trading it in for another name, their adult name and identity, or at least their identity as long as they are aligned with the same male. The more I thought about the implications of that, the more I understood that it is a feminist position for women to claim their names as a permanent identity. IMHO it's just an issue where you define the feminist response differently.