I grew up in the 70s and 80s and it never ever crossed my mind about not changing my surname on marriage. I really hate that I didn’t give it enough thought though. Not only did my cousin not change hers, but she also shunned marriage too. I wish I had really thought about all of this earlier, like she did. I’m sorry that I’m late to the party, but I’m pleased the full awakening finally came in mid-life! The thing is, it just wasn’t really done. My cousin was an anomaly (in a good way, she’s fierce and independent and doesn’t give a shit what people think). Me, in my younger years, less so. I just wanted to fit in and live the “dream” I’d been fed for so many years. So I got married, at a hotel, blindly signed the paperwork and duly went and changed the four million bits of paperwork to take my husband’s name. It was more than a bit of a pain, and I had to purchase multiple marriage certificates in order to mail them off to each record-holder, but I was all wrapped up in the romance of marriage and a future life together. Feeling loved, wanted and accepted for who I was. I look back now and cringe at the much younger naive me, practicing my new signature a few months before the wedding, all head-over-heels and blinded by love! For any name changes other than marriage, an enrolled deed poll costs £53.05 [1], so in a way it’s sort of encouraged by the fact that there is no cost involved.
And I’m not the only one. Looking at an Opinium survey from February 2026, 81% of women legally changed their surname and only 10% of men did [3]. A further 6% of women used their partner’s or new surname without actually changing it legally, and 13% of women neither changed nor used their partner’s surname at all [3].
I fall into the 53% of women who changed it because that was “just what was done”. And the numbers also clearly show a distinct shift because when split by age, the baby boomer women made up 60% in this category and the millennials only 36%. The younger generation are clearly thinking about it more than I did. 50% of the women said that they wanted the same surname as their partner, and I guess I also fall into that category, because it sounds like a great idea doesn’t it. But why? I never really scratched any deeper, other than “because”. 26% wanted their children to share the surname [3]. Fair, but no immediate reason really other than “because” to take the husband’s.
Of everyone that changed their surname on marriage, 86% took their partner’s. 4% double-barrelled the name and only 3% made a new one. Among women, 92% took their partner’s name [3].
The other finding was that 12% of women who changed their name regretted it and 40% of men did [3]. Perhaps the men’s regret is so high because of social pressure? And another example of attitudes changing: overall 14% of changers regretted it, with millennials’ responses to the same question standing at 21% [3].
An earlier study showed that in 2016, 59% of British women said they would like to take their spouse’s surname, and 61% of men wanted their wife to [4]. In 2025, it had dropped to 51% of women willing to, and 56% of men wanting them to [5]. So fewer women want to take their spouse’s name and fewer men want (or expect) them to.
Way back before any of this, for the first 300 years that surnames existed in England, there was no settled rule as to what happened to people’s names. However in Scotland, women kept their own name until living memory. A woman changing her surname on marriage is a custom that was made, not found.
History tells us that the oldest surviving marriage laws are from the Code of Hammurabi in Babylon from about 1750 BC. 282 laws that were etched onto a stone that now sits in the Louvre [21]. These rules explain that a wife is something that is paid for and if a man divorces her before they have children, he gives her the amount of her purchase money and dowry and lets her go [22]. Love also originally never had anything to do with it, that only came on board in the 18th or 19th century. Before then marriage was a way of circulating obligations and goods between families [23]. And all of this happened way before the Church. In England the state only started insisting on a church and a register in 1754 [24].
So marriage started out as a deal between two families, with the woman being the thing that was handed over along with the goods. Every other part of that deal has now gone, apart from handing over her name. Back in England, meanwhile, surnames hadn’t properly arrived yet.
Up until the Norman invasion, many English women went by their own name, and children sometimes took their mother’s name [17].
Back in 1066, there were no hereditary surnames in Britain. A few Norman nobles had them, but they ultimately grew through English landholders through the twelfth century and reached peasants from about 1225. By the early 1300s they were in fairly general use, spread because the feudal king needed to know what service each knight owed, and because lawyers, monasteries and tax rolls needed to tell people apart [16].
It was after feudalism narrowed women’s rights to inherit and hold property that English wives increasingly took their husbands’ surnames. The later medieval courtroom also had a habit of naming a wife entirely by her husband, as in “Mrs Him” [17].
Scottish women kept their family names on marriage until as recently as the early twentieth century, and Scots law, unlike English common law, barred either spouse from disposing of land without the other’s consent [19, 17].
Looking back, it was in 1765 that women legally disappeared. The law stated that “by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law” and “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage”. This is commonly described as “coverture”. It means any of her property, her earnings and her legal self, passed to him [6]. The patriarchy was really kicking ass during this period.
The custom of taking the husband’s name grew up alongside coverture, as a wife had no separate legal existence to attach a name to [7].
By the early 1800s England was “the only place in Europe where a woman took her husband’s surname” [20], and “Mrs” didn’t mean married woman until about 1900. Before then it was the exact equivalent of “Mr” and marked social standing rather than marital status, indicating a business woman, regardless of their marital status [20].
Back in 1855, Lucy Stone was awakened to the inequality way before me or my cousin. Lucy was an American suffragist and kept her own name when she married Henry Blackwell, as a protest against the laws on married women [8].
Women’s groups successfully campaigned for an end to coverture over property in England with the Married Women’s Property Acts in the late 19th century. The 1870 Act finally made a married woman’s earnings her own instead of her husband’s and the 1882 Act gave married women “complete personal control over all of their property” [25].
Nowadays, no one in England and Wales is forced by law to take their husband’s name. People can choose and use any name they like, and a marriage certificate is accepted as evidence of that change [1].
All of this history can be interpreted and to me it takes away the word “tradition” from any argument. Taking a man’s name on marriage didn’t come from religion, it came from property law [17]. This wasn’t a tradition handed down from anywhere holy, it was a custom that came from property law and the courts, and it stuck. Plus the people living a few hundred miles north over the border didn’t do it.
OK let’s talk about the men. One in ten married British men legally changed his surname according to the same 2026 survey. 87% didn’t change it at all [3]. 59% of the ones that kept their name said they weren’t expected to change it and 15% of those that did change it said they felt like they had to [3].
There’s a disparity here because only 27% of people saw a man taking his wife’s name as a positive, against almost double that for a woman taking her husband’s (53%). And in older men it’s tiny, just 8% thought it was a good idea for him to take her name [5]. Which fits with the fact that 44% of men and 27% of women (35% combined) specifically said that they thought it was “taking feminism too far” [3]. As an aside, I honestly don't think we can take feminism too far. Not until men stop killing women at the rate they currently do, male violence against women and girls is eradicated, we have at least equal genders in government and business leaderships, equal pay and equal rights. Anyway, back to names. It’s funny to me how many people this topic seems to piss off. It’s the same across the pond, with 92% of married American men keeping their name and only 5% taking their wife’s [9].
And now the turn of the women. Of millennial women who married, 55% changed their name and used it everywhere, against 81% of baby boomer women [3]. There were some interesting reasons as to why some women kept their names, a quarter (25% of respondents) being pure laziness! The biggest reason at 38% was because it was part of who they are. 12% actually called the practice outdated [3]. Looking to Gen Z women who weren’t married yet, only 38% said they’d take his name against 75% of married women who took their partner’s name [3]. In a separate poll, 24% of women aged 18 to 34 said they would have both partners keeping their own names, which was twice the rate of men the same age. So more men wanted women to take their names [5]. Interesting.
This shows that the next generation or two of women after mine are definitely shifting. There’s no right or wrong here, but perhaps they’re not just blindly doing it “because that’s what people do” anymore.
Some countries just stopped it altogether. For example, since 1981 in Quebec, a woman can't take her husband's surname as her legal name even if she wanted to. Greece followed suit in 1983. It’s so odd to me that something that we as a country and culture change without a second thought has been illegal (not just culturally different, but illegal!) in other countries for almost 50 years. In France your legal name is the name that you were born with, and that dates back to the Revolution. French women are allowed to use his name socially but it is never legally theirs on paper. Italy stopped it in 1975, although over there a woman can stick his name on after her own if she likes. In Belgium and the Netherlands women's surnames don't change either, and in Spain and most of Spanish-speaking Latin America, South Korea and Malaysia there are no laws on it because the culture and the norm there is that women just keep their names [11].
Changing or not changing your name is a common discussion here in England if people are having or have had children, because the question arises as to which name the baby will take. In Quebec a child can either take one parent’s surname or both [26]. In France the parents can choose his surname or hers or both of them joined together [27], and in Italy their top court ruled in 2022 that handing a child the father's name automatically was discriminatory and harmful. To me, researching this has absolutely floored me. Something that we take for granted in this country has been labelled as discriminatory and harmful in Italy. It's really opened my eyes to this whole topic and something that we really should think about. So children in Italy now get both names unless the parents agree on one [28].
I think one of the big takeaways from this piece of research is that we really need to just put a little bit more thought into it. Not even that really, we need to start putting thought into it full stop.
So my research then led me onto Japan, which I had previously done an Instagram reel on, because Japan is the only country in the world whose law forces a married couple to share one surname [12, 13]. It doesn't insist on it being his, but it does insist on it being only either his or hers, and nothing else, and this is important. In 2022, 478,199 of the 504,930 couples who got married in Japan took the husband's name. That's a whopping 94.7% [12]. This law has been in place since 1947. Prior to that she had to take his, and so when this law came into place the words changed but the practice stayed exactly the same [13, 14]. Japan’s Supreme Court has looked at this issue twice, once in 2015 and once in 2021, and said that it was absolutely fine and told the parliament to debate it [13, 14]. Well here's a surprise, Parliament never has. There was one attempt back in 1996 when the Justice Ministry’s advisory council recommended letting couples choose. However that didn't even make it as far as a vote because of fierce opposition inside the governing party at the time [14]. External pressure from the UN women's rights committee also hasn't changed anything. They told Japan to change the rule four times, in 2003, 2009, 2016 and again in October 2024 [29].
In 2022 a government survey found that 61% of people were in favour of letting couples keep separate names [14], and even Japan's biggest business lobby agreed in 2024. They weighed in on it purely for paperwork reasons, because women who used their own names at work kept hitting errors because the official documents had their husband’s name [13], so it just turned into an admin nightmare! However the Japanese government didn’t budge, even under their first ever woman Prime Minister. In May they shelved even the watered down bill that would’ve let a married woman put only her birth name on official documents. It seemed that parliament was far too busy with a bill to set up a national intelligence council and a bill about damaging the flag than to think about women's rights [15]. Frighteningly, one economist has worked out that if this rule stays in place everyone in Japan will end up being called “Sato” by the year 2531 [13]. Madness! Choice isn't really a choice if almost 95% of it goes one way. In Japan nobody is forced to take their husband’s name because the law gives them a choice and says that they can use either one, however 95 times in a hundred she takes his. And sadly that is what “choice” looks like when all the pressure goes in one direction, and it's what our 81% looks like in Britain too.
All of this brings me to who the name is actually for. In Britain 72% of mothers gave their child their partner’s surname [3]. Double-barrelling the kids’ names is still fairly rare, it’s 13% of Gen Z parents and 10% of millennials [3].
And here in our house, I blindly took my husband's name and didn't think twice about my kids' names being his. The only factor that ran through my head was that my maiden name was difficult to spell, and so I felt quite pleased that I wouldn't have to spell it out at every interaction to do with my name. Embarrassingly I didn't think deeper than that, and I apologise to the women of the world for that! If I had my time again, with the knowledge that I have now, I don't think I would change my surname. I wouldn't want to piss him off, that isn't my aim, and certainly a much more researched and thought about decision would be made together about my name, his name and our future children's names. I’m not saying that everyone needs to keep their name, and it's not even that everyone should have a choice, which of course they should, but Japan shows that simply having a choice isn’t necessarily a free one when the backdrop of the culture and society make it a Hobson’s choice. Real choice means informed decisions. And when it was time to make those decisions in our family we just did what everyone else did without thinking. Perhaps that is what governments and patriarchy like us to do???
When I asked in my newsletter whether you’d changed your name, Marta wrote back from Ireland. She’s Portuguese, and in Portugal women don’t give up their family names when they marry. “Our names often carry both our maternal and paternal family lineages,” she said. “I can look at my grandmother’s name, for example, and trace the families she came from.” When she married in Ireland she was expected to drop all of that and take his, and she wouldn’t. She kept her names and added his, and her reasons were ones she could explain: affection for his family, and a father who’d have been proud of the family she married into. Hers was a choice. And she nailed what I’d been struggling to say: “A woman can have an entire family history, ancestry, identity and sense of self, and upon marriage becomes absorbed into her husband’s family name.” She’s been addressed as Mrs followed by her husband’s full name, so her first name had gone too. “I become identifiable entirely through my husband.” Then she asked a profound question: “if something as personal and fundamental as our name can be so readily surrendered through cultural convention, what other aspects of women’s identities, histories and agency are quietly negotiated away without us even noticing?”
Most women who change their name don't regret it and there are good reasons to change a name. 77% of people who changed theirs said that it made them feel part of a family unit and 44% of women preferred their married name to their original, a bit like me [3]. I guess what upsets me is that there are 18% of British people who already think that changing their surname means losing a bit of who they are, and 29% of Gen Z [3], but there are still four in five of us doing it mostly because “that's just what’s done”. There isn't a law that tells us we have to, we just do it, and that isn't really a proper choice. So if you happen to be signing the form this weekend all I can say is that I didn't think about any of this and I didn't know about any of this when I signed mine. So if you've read this, you’re one step ahead of me.
A new standard adult passport costs from £102, but there’s no obligation to immediately change it [2]. A married woman can continue to travel, so long as she carries an original marriage certificate showing her change of name. So think about it before you do it. Even if it’s only to save yourself £102 on a new passport.
The Receipts // (Sources)
Sources correct as at 28 October 2026.
[1] GOV.UK, Change your name by deed poll.
[2] GOV.UK, Passport fees.
[3] Opinium, Vibe check: marital surnames, 13 February 2026.
[4] YouGov, Taking a new husband's surname is still popular with younger women, 13 September 2016.
[5] YouGov, How do Britons think couples should choose their married name?, 14 April 2025.
[6] William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book 1, Of the Rights of Persons, 1765.
[7] Euronews, More Gen Z women are saying 'I don't' to this marital tradition, 16 April 2025.
[8] Encyclopaedia Britannica, Lucy Stone.
[9] Pew Research Center, About 8 in 10 women in opposite-sex marriages say they took their husband's last name, 7 September 2023.
[10] Not used.
[11] TIME, Here Are Places Women Can't Take Their Husband's Name When They Get Married, 29 June 2015.
[12] nippon.com, Japan Data: marriage and surnames, Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare vital statistics 2022.
[13] ABC News (Australia), Why Japan is the only country where married couples must have the same surname, 20 April 2024.
[14] Yasuo Takao, Japan sorely needs separate surnames, East Asia Forum, 10 April 2024.
[15] Jiji Press via nippon.com, Japan Govt Unable to Introduce Maiden Name Bill for Now, 13 May 2026.
[16] George English, Surname Formation in Britain, University of St Andrews Institute of Scottish Historical Research, May 2015.
[17] Rebecca Mason, What's in a Surname?, History Workshop, 30 May 2022.
[18] Not used.
[19] Sharon L. Krossa, Early 16th Century Scottish Lowland Names, Medieval Scotland.
[20] University of Cambridge, Mistress, Miss, Mrs or Ms: untangling the shifting history of titles, 6 October 2014, on Amy Louise Erickson, Mistresses and Marriage: or, a Short History of the Mrs, History Workshop Journal, 2014.
[21] Encyclopaedia Britannica, Code of Hammurabi.
[22] The Code of Hammurabi, translated by L. W. King, Avalon Project, Yale Law School.
[23] Stephanie Coontz on Hidden Brain, When Did Marriage Become So Hard?, NPR, 2018.
[24] Clandestine Marriages Act 1753, with Rebecca Probert, Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
[25] UK Parliament, Living Heritage: Property and children, Married Women's Property Acts 1870 and 1882.
[26] Civil Code of Québec, article 51.
[27] Service-public.fr, Nom de famille de l'enfant.
[28] Scripps News, Italian court rules kids should get both parents' last names, 28 April 2022, reporting the Constitutional Court ruling of 27 April 2022.
[29] nippon.com, Japan Data: UN committee recommends Japan allow separate surnames for married couples, October 2024; Japan Today, UN body again urges Japan to allow separate surnames for couples, October 2024.
