‘Marrying left your maiden name disused,” Philip Larkin wrote in 1955. “Its five light sounds no longer mean your face, / Your voice, and all your variants of grace.” Larkin’s poem, written about his friend Winifred Arnott, sees the lost maiden name as a symbol of the erasure of a woman’s youthful and sexually desirable self, now swallowed up in domestic duties and motherhood. The birth name, to him, “means what we feel now about you then: How beautiful you were, and near and young”.
Reading Larkin is never a simple matter, and his depicted transition from “maiden” to “married” name invites multiple interpretations. On the one hand, it’s easy to understand the poem as an elegy for a loved person who has been married out of existence. On the other, the narrator admits that the subject of his elegy is “thankfully confused in law” with her husband-to-be. The shedding of the maiden name could be seen either as a tragic sublimation of identity or as a natural and welcome step; an escape from the erotic attentions, perhaps, of such men as the poet himself. But whether the name change means obliteration or maturation, we should not make the mistake of imagining that it means nothing at all.
As my partner and I make decisions about our marriage next year, I’ve found myself thinking about Larkin’s words. If marital surname change was open to ambiguous interpretations in 1955, it is even more so in 2014. Recently, lawyer Amal Alamuddin’s decision to change her name when she married George Clooney was both fervently criticised and heatedly defended. Just a few months earlier, the singer who has announced herself, in the space of a few years, as Cheryl Tweedy, Cheryl Cole and Cheryl Fernandez-Varsini was variously mocked and praised for her willingness to change her “brand” for each new husband. Feelings about these women’s decisions ran high in the press and on social media. Some feminists pointed out that women suffer detriment to their careers when they change their names; that they signal their submission to their husbands, and reinforce to their children the idea that women are inferior to men. (One recent survey found that school pupils thought men taking their wives’ surnames would demonstrate a “weak character” but the reverse would show women were “grown-up”.) Others defended Amal Clooney and Cheryl Fernandez-Varsini, claiming that women’s surnames mean little to them, that the birth name is usually the father’s name anyway, or that their decision to take their husband’s name showed that they were truly committed to the partnership.
When this last argument has been made to me by my name-changing friends, I’ve pointed out it implies the man who keeps his name is not committed. “Ah, but it’s traditional for the woman to change,” they might retort: “neither of us really think it’s that important, but we wanted to have the same name, and it just made more sense to go with tradition.” This argument presupposes that “traditions” are worth preserving. But how many of us actually know where the tradition of marital surname change comes from, and what it originally signified? And are we sure it is a tradition we want to preserve? A dip into the history of surname change reveals that, at best, its origins are controversial; at worst, they are deeply unsavoury.
British hereditary surnames are about 1,000 years old. Imported by the Normans, they had stabilised throughout much of English society by the 14th century, with Celtic regions taking longer to adapt. Married women, however, were perceived to have no surname at all, since the Normans had also brought with them the doctrine of coverture, the legal principle that, on marriage, a woman became her husband’s possession. Her state of namelessness reflected this. In the words of one court in 1340, “when a woman took a husband, she lost every surname except ‘wife of’.”
Around the turn of the 15th century, the French doctrine of coverture received a unique English twist. There was another interpretation of coverture available, based on scriptural ideas, which focused not on the husband’s power over his wife but on the unity that marriage gave them. According to the English jurist Henry de Bracton, they became “a single person, because they are one flesh and one blood”. As this idea gained ground, so did the clerical habit of designating a married woman by her husband’s surname. But she could not hold property or go to law – legally, she ceased to exist.
By the early 17th century, the custom of a woman adopting her husband’s surname was sufficiently entrenched in England that the antiquarian William Camden could write: “Women with us, at their marriage, do change their surnames, and pass into their husbands names, and justly. For they are no more twain, but one flesh.” The custom was specific to England. Camden noted with disapproval: “And yet in France and the Netherlands, the better sort of women will still retain their own name with their husbands … But I fear husbands will not like this note, for that some of their dames may be ambitiously over-pert and too forward to imitate it.”
So even in 1605, Camden identified a woman’s desire to retain her own name on marriage with “ambition”, “pertness” and “forwardness”. Perhaps this was because he saw the surname as an especially important component of the name: surnames were, he declared, “especially respected as whereon the glory and credit of men is grounded, and by which the same is conveyed to the knowledge of posterity”. But by the middle of the 18th century, as print culture expanded and literacy increased, some of those most preoccupied with “glory”, “credit” and “posterity” were wealthy, powerful or famous married women who resented that their names would die with them. In the words of the aristocrat and writer Mary Wortley-Montagu, women desired “that Fame which Men have engross’d to themselves and will not suffer us to share”.