Breaking Tradition: The Journey to Married Name Gender Equality Part 1

Welcome to the ENYTinG Gender podcast, where we explore the nuances of gender equality in various aspects of life. I'm your host, Sharmin Prince, and today we have a fascinating discussion with Melania Murphy, a writer, speaker, and soon-to-be author. Melania's expertise lies in empowering women through the topic of married name choices, a subject she delves into in her upcoming book, "Bound by Love, Not Tradition: Empowering Women Through Married Name Choices." In this episode, Melania shares her personal journey and insights into the tradition of women taking their husband's last name, the unconscious biases and stereotypes that accompany it, and the importance of achieving married name gender equality. We also explore how same-sex couples approach this decision and the evolving trends in name choices among men and women. Join us as we uncover the significance of names, identity, and equality in marriage.

Speaker 1
00:02 - 00:22
Welcome to the ENYTinG Gender podcast! I am Sharmin Prince, your host. And today I have a guest, Melania Murphy. Melania, thank you for joining us today on the Anything Gender podcast. But let me read your bio.

Speaker 1
00:23 - 01:10
Melania Murphy is a writer, speaker, and soon to be author Her area of expertise focuses on empowering women through the topic of married name choices. Her book on the same subject will be published later this year, titled Bound by Love, Not Tradition, Empowering Women Through Married Name Choices. She has a degree in applied behavioral science, a master's in leadership, and has spent the last decade collecting stories from couples and professionals around the topic of married name, gender equality. Welcome, Melania.

Speaker 1
01:11 - 01:16
Melania. Thank you. Yes, thank you very much. I'm thrilled to be here today.

Speaker 1
01:16 - 01:42
Is there anything else you would like to add to that bio? Yeah, it covers it. I'm really excited to get into the topic and answer any questions that you have, because I just, I love talking about this topic. My first question is what led you into this space of marriage named gender equality?

Speaker 1
01:43 - 01:52
You know what? I've thought about that a lot myself. But, you know, growing up, my dad passed away when I was young. I was only three.

Speaker 1
01:52 - 02:13
He died from kidney failure as a result of juvenile diabetes. And so my mom and my siblings and I, we lived with my grandmother for a while. And then when my mom remarried, We moved in with my stepdad, of course, and this was back in the 70s. And so she, of course, you know, changed her name.

Speaker 1
02:13 - 02:46
And it was just kind of fascinating to me that here I lived with my grandma who had a different last name than my mom, my siblings, and I. And now we moved in with my stepdad. And so now my mom has a different last name than my siblings and I, and I just thought, I mean, I was seven when she remarried, so I'm like, you know, we're all a family. What does it really matter what the last name is, you know?

Speaker 1
02:46 - 03:07
And so as I've talked to friends, acquaintances over the years, for example, One of my friends had a lovely Irish last name. I knew her. Her name is Moriarty. And she fell in love and she became engaged to a man whose last name was Dam, D-A-M-M.

Speaker 1
03:09 - 03:30
And I'm like, oh my gosh, what are you going to do? Are you going to change your name to his name? This was back in the 80s, and she was really struggling with that because the tradition is that a woman drops her surname, her birth name, and takes on the husband's name. She really didn't want to take on that name.

Speaker 1
03:30 - 03:54
And at the time, people were saying hyphenating was kind of inconvenient. And so she went with tradition and she dropped her name and she became Megan Dam. And I just always thought this would be a perfect opportunity for maybe the man to take the woman's name. And then they went on to have three children and sent them to a Catholic school.

Speaker 1
03:54 - 04:26
So I still laugh every time I think of the principal there, you know, calling the three damn kids to the office. So I think it's just always been kind of fascinating to me how not a tradition of women taking the man's name, but how it's so ingrained in our society. Underneath that tradition, there's a lot of unconscious biases. There's a lot of stereotypes, a lot of feelings underneath that.

Speaker 1
04:26 - 04:46
And I think it impacts women because we feel less than the man. So I think it's really interesting to see how that plays out in our society. Is that why you labeled it married name gender equality? Right.

Speaker 1
04:46 - 05:01
Yeah. Because if you take gender out of that decision, getting married, we want to have the same last name. We want to have kids in the future. Um, what are we going to give them?

Speaker 1
05:02 - 05:35
what are we going to name our kids? If you take gender out of that equation, like same-sex couples, and they are getting married, they come to that discussion table on a completely different playing field because, and I've talked to many same-sex couples where they feel like, you know what, my name, my ancestry, my everything that's wrapped up in my birth name is just as important as your name. So what are we going to do as a couple?

Speaker 1
05:35 - 06:00
How do we want our new union to unite that name or maybe they both want to keep their own names. Maybe, yeah, I just talked to a couple this week who they each kept their own. And then when they had children, they hyphenated their two names together. So they said that they hyphenate, the two mothers hyphenate, but legally they never changed their names on anything.

Speaker 1
06:01 - 06:18
So I think when a man and a woman come to that same decision-making table, We've already given precedent to the man. We're already saying the man's name is more important. His ancestry is more important. His identity is more important and.

Speaker 1
06:19 - 06:31
Me as a woman, I need to decide what do I want to do coming together as a couple and. like any other decision couples have to make. Where do we want to live? Where do we want to go on our honeymoon?

Speaker 1
06:31 - 07:12
You know, they usually make that decision together where, but with the family name, their new married name, if they choose to change their names, it's more, we're giving more importance to the man's name. And I think that that's what I mean by married name, gender equality, that our names have more than just, you know, Murphy has a lot more significance than just the name Murphy. It has a lot behind it. And when it's a gender equal, it means that both people, people, their families, their ancestry, their names, their identity is just as important as the other person.

Speaker 1
07:13 - 07:44
Thank you for that. Why is achieving married name gender equality important to both women and men within the society. I'm glad you brought up that point because it is important to men as well as to women. You know, it's a society taught tradition in the United States, so that we take the man's name.

Speaker 1
07:44 - 08:08
But for men, there's many opportunities to broaden what's okay and what's normal. I talked to a man who, and this is just fun, it's a fun story, but he grew up loving the movie called Maltese Falcon. And it was a 1941 old-time movie. He's not that old, I don't know, in his 40s, something like that, but he just loved that old-time movie.

Speaker 1
08:08 - 08:28
And The main character in that movie, his name is Sam, and this man that I talked to, his name is Sam. So when he met a woman whose last name is Falcon, and he's like, hey, you know what? If we ever get married, I'm going to change my name to yours because I want to be Sam Falcon. And it turns out that they did get married, and he did take her name.

Speaker 1
08:28 - 08:44
But you know, it was something fun. So it was an opportunity for him to have other options other than the traditional, we'll take his name. There's other situations too. I can go back to my friend who's now a dam.

Speaker 1
08:44 - 09:13
You know, there's a lot of names that in this day and age are kind of considered maybe unfortunate or kind of awkward, you know, last names. And again, thinking about the significance, the legacy that you want to pass on to your children. That's something that can change. You don't have to stick with that name if that's not the name that you want to pass on to your children or you no longer want to be identified as.

Speaker 1
09:13 - 09:41
So it's something that for men, it can also broaden their options and opportunities as well as for women, too. Thank you for that. While doing this work, I know you mentioned some. What percentage of men Have you met or encountered who decided to take their wife's last name?

Speaker 1
09:42 - 10:40
Actually, the most recent Pew Research study, it was done in 2023, and at that time it said that about 80% of women in the United States still drop their name and take on the husband's name. And now about five percent of men are now changing their name, either taking on the wife's name or hyphenating his name with her name or creating a new name. So, you know, when you look back to the 1970s, when, for example, Miss Magazine that was first introduced, published, and it was around that time, too, that they were introducing the prefix Ms, M-S, instead of M-R-S, you know, and M-I. And also Ms. Magazine was encouraging or announcing, or maybe the word is more like, hey, women, did you know that you could keep your name?

Speaker 1
10:40 - 11:08
You know, you don't have to take his name, and really encouraging women to keep their own maiden name, their birth name. So at that time, about 17% of women did keep their birth name. their family name when they got married compared to 20% of women now. So the amount of women keeping their maiden name when they get married really hasn't changed that much since the 1970s.

Speaker 1
11:09 - 11:28
I've only talked to one person who said that her husband took her name and they've been married for 52 years. But other than that, back in the 70s, I don't think men changed their name at all. But so it is starting to pick up a little bit. I did talk to a couple.

Speaker 1
11:29 - 11:41
He's an engineer, and they didn't like the whole tradition. They didn't like the roots of that tradition, where it was based in patriarchy. The women were the property of the men. They just didn't like that whole thing.

Speaker 1
11:41 - 12:18
And he was an engineer, so he just wanted to make sure it was fair. Whatever name they chose, it was fair, and it was equal, and each one had the same chance that they could take their name. So what they did up at the altar after their, I think it was a priest, you know, announced them husband and wife, then they flipped this coin that they had made for the wedding and one side had her face on it and the other one had his face on it and they flipped the coin and her face came up, side up, so they both took her name.

Speaker 1
12:18 - 12:42
So That's kind of crazy, but it worked for them because they weren't sure what to do. They both knew their names were important to them. They didn't feel that hyphenating. They didn't want to go that route, but they were both okay with, let's just flip a coin and let's just go with it that way.

Speaker 1
12:42 - 12:59
And that's what they decided to do. I remember years ago speaking to a married woman and I asked her why she hyphenated her name. And her response to me was he didn't purchase the entire estate. Right.

Speaker 1
13:00 - 13:18
What are some of the reasons you have encountered where, where women kept their name? What were those reasons that they decide I am going to hyphenate? I am not dropping my last name. Right.

Speaker 1
13:18 - 13:42
Oh, there's a lot of reasons. I mean, first of all, some women just say, I like my name and I don't want to change it. You know, there's reasons why maybe she doesn't want to take his damn name or maybe his name is not something she wants to, um, change her identity too. There's also the whole branding, marketing.

Speaker 1
13:42 - 13:53
Maybe they've had bylines published with their maiden name. They've earned degrees, PhDs. They've done research papers. They've named their own company with their maiden name.

Speaker 1
13:53 - 14:08
So for those reasons, maybe they want to keep it. Or maybe, yeah, they just have... I talked to a lady just a couple of weeks ago. Her husband His name is, let me see if I can get this correct.

Speaker 1
14:09 - 14:24
Basically, he has no association with his name. I think it maybe was his mother's ex-husband's name. So the mother, after they got divorced, kept that name. And anyway, he has no association with that name.

Speaker 1
14:25 - 14:32
It's not his lineage. It has nothing to do with him. And she's like, why would I take that name? It's just a name.

Speaker 1
14:32 - 14:50
And so she hyphenated his name with her name. So yeah, there's a bunch of different reasons why women might keep their names. I did ask a lady, too. She said, you know what, after talking to you, I decided I am gonna hyphenate my name.

Speaker 1
14:50 - 15:03
I'm not just going to take his name. I'm going to hyphenate my name with his name." And I said, oh, that's okay. If that works for you, that sounds great. I said, would you like him to hyphenate his name with yours?

Speaker 1
15:03 - 15:07
You know, I mean, why not? It's fair. It's equal, right? I'm changing my name.

Speaker 1
15:08 - 15:21
You can change your name. She said, you know, I would really like that. You know, of course she can offer that option to him and then it's up to him what he wants to do. And Some guys do, some guys don't.

Speaker 1
15:23 - 15:43
And I think that's what this is all about. It's that we have options now. You know, we have choices, we have options, which in the United States is fun because other countries do have laws around this. And so in the United States, we can choose what we want and where in other countries people can't choose.

Speaker 1
15:44 - 16:20
And there's some cultures where I think it's customary for men to take the women's name. But back to gender equality, does women change their identities or are their identities altered when they get married? They drop their last name and they take on the name of their husband. Is there a name back on who they are as a person or as a woman.

Speaker 1
16:22 - 16:54
You know, I, I can think of my own personal situation when I first got married at 21. Tell you the truth, I know this is a subject that I love, you know, I was kind of wrapped up in the whole marriage thing and just not part of the wedding checklist, like, decide what name you're going to take. It's just kind of one of those automatic things or it's just assumed that that's going to happen. So 21, yep, really didn't think about it too much, and I just changed my name to his.

Speaker 1
16:54 - 17:26
So my ancestry is German, and like my mom's name is Schultz, you know, before that Schug, my main name was Schweiger, and I married a man whose last name is Murphy. Again, I was 21, and you know, so now I'm Melania Murphy, And almost instantly, people's like, it's a nice Irish name, you know, a cute Irish name for a cute Irish girl. And I'm like, actually, I have no Irish blood in me at all. I've just, you know, that's just my name now.

Speaker 1
17:26 - 17:46
And, and we went on to have three kids. awesome, great kids, and everybody just associates them as being Irish. And I'm like, hey, don't forget, you're also German. Oh, and I, I feed them bratwurst and sauerkraut and I dance the polka with them in the living room and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1
17:46 - 18:33
But they all pretty much only identify with the Irish side of things. So, um, I was like, wow, I didn't realize when I gave up my German name, my German ancestry name, that I was kind of passing along only the Irish to the kids. But I mean, as far as, right, does changing your name really change your identity? And back when Again, a couple decades ago, the etiquette here in the United States, and I'm sure in other places too, was to address the married woman using that prefix, M-R-S.

Speaker 1
18:34 - 19:07
And traditionally, that prefix meant the wife of. So when a woman would be addressed as Mrs. John Smith, You know, it was saying that you are the wife of John Smith, like, it would be inappropriate for me to say. Traditional etiquette way for me to use the prefix with my name because I am not if I were to say, I'm Mrs Murphy. Traditionally, that would be incorrect because I'm not the wife of Melania Murphy.

Speaker 1
19:07 - 19:46
So it's got to be MRS plus the man's name and his last name. So I think, yeah, the traditional, the law way back then is that a woman's identity did get absorbed into the man's identity and they became one person, the whole coverture, doctrine of coverture laws. It was assumed that the woman was covered by the man and they became one person and that person was the man. So traditionally that identity does get erased.

Speaker 1
19:46 - 20:08
The woman's identity gets erased. And again, as with anything with these longstanding laws and now that our traditions, these ghosts of coverture, it still kind of invades our identity a little bit. Not as much, obviously, because women have more college degrees now. Women are the breadwinners of the family.

Speaker 1
20:08 - 20:22
We own businesses. So women are much more empowered now, but we still have a ways to go. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much.