down. “Married women,” wrote Justice Joe Henry, “have labored under a form of societal compulsion and economic coercion which has not been conducive to the assertion of some rights and privileges of citizenship.” A requirement that a woman take her husband’s name “would stifle and chill virtually all progress in the rapidly expanding field of human liberties. We live in a new day. We cannot create and continue conditions and then defend their existence by reliance on the custom thus created.”
Women began keeping their names in the seventies, when it became broadly possible to do so. In 1986, The New York Times began using the honorific “Ms.” to refer to women whose marital status was unknown, as well as to married women who wished to use their birth names. The trend of name independence peaked in the nineties, at a rather paltry 23 percent of married women, and today less than 20 percent keep their names. The decision “is one of convenience,” Katie Roiphe wrote at Slate in 2004. “The politics are almost incidental. Our fundamental independence is not so imperiled that we need to keep our names….At this point—apologies to Lucy Stone, and her pioneering work in name keeping—our attitude is: Whatever works.”
Roiphe’s laissez-faire postfeminist view remains common. Women believe that their names are personal, not political—in large part because the decision-making around them remains so culturally restricted and curtailed. A woman keeping her name is making a choice that is expected to be limited and futile. She will not pass the name down to her children, or bestow it upon her husband. At most—or so people tend to think—her last name will be crammed into the middle of her children’s names, or packed around a hyphen, and then later dropped for space reasons. (And in fact, a Louisiana law still requires the child of a married couple to bear the husband’s last name in order for a birth certificate to be issued.) We find it inappropriate for women to treat their names the way that men, by default, feel entitled to. On this front, as on so many others, a woman is allowed to assert her independence as long as it doesn’t affect anyone else.
Of course, there are no clear-cut ways to navigate family names even with a presumption of gender equality: hyphenated names dissolve after a single generation, and generally speaking, one name has got to go. But there’s a flexibility with which queer couples approach the issue of naming children—as well as wedding-related conventions in general, particularly proposals—that is conspicuously absent from the heterosexual scene. In marriage, too, gay couples divide household work more equally than straight couples do, and when they adopt “traditional” gender roles, they “tend to reject the notion that their labor arrangements are imitative or derivative of those of heterosexual couples,” as Abbie Goldberg writes in a 2013 study. Instead, “they interpret their arrangements as pragmatic and chosen.” Gay couples are also more likely to find their division of labor to be fair than straight couples—a statistic that holds, crucially, even when the work is not divided evenly. (In other words, their hopes and their outcomes are more closely aligned.) The institution works differently without the power imbalance that historically defined it. Like any social construct, marriage is most flexible when it is new.
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How is it possible that so much of contemporary life feels so arbitrary and so inescapable? Thinking about weddings has not been very useful to me: developing an understanding of the material conditions that produced the wedding ritual, its basis in inequality and its role in perpetuating that inequality, hasn’t really meant a thing. It doesn’t remove me from a culture that is organized through marriage and weddings; it certainly doesn’t make it any less sensible to do what all the affianced of the past, present, and future have done and are doing, which is taking these opportunities for ritual pleasure and sweetness whenever they can.
And still I wonder how much harder it would be to get straight women to accept the reality of marriage if they were not first presented with the fantasy of a wedding. I wonder if women today would so readily accept the unequal diminishment of their independence without their sense of self-importance being overinflated first. It feels like a trick, a trick that has worked and is still working, that the bride remains the image of womanhood at its most broadly celebrated—and that planning a wedding is the only period