"The bride, 27, will take her husband’s name. She flies the RC-135, a reconnaissance aircraft. She graduated from the Air Force Academy."

This, from today's NYT Weddings pages, jumped out at me because I'd had open, in another window, the latest Facebook thread about women, marriage, and name-change. This is a subject of endless fascination to many women (and some men) my age. We have on the one hand the contingent convinced that marital name-change is a self-evident evil, and on the other, a whole bunch of seemingly reasonable - even, at times (see above example) quite impressive women taking their husband's names. There are also women who are not living their lives at all along feminist lines, of course, doing so.

Has anyone ever looked into whether there's a relationship between traditional gender roles within a marriage (i.e. who makes the most money, who has the gendered-male or gendered-female career, who does most of the housework/childcare) and whether the wife changed her name? Because my anecdotal evidence is a whole big pile of there being no particular relationship between these things. It seems as though whichever cultural-values thing is governing whether a woman chooses to change her name is different from the one that determines how to approach life in other areas. 

What tends to skew the conversation is that the women whose voices are heard most loudly in cultural discussions are ones who happen to work as writers, and who have really made their names already, in a way that doesn't correspond to how most lives go, where it's really not such a big deal to learn that Ms. A from Accounting now goes by Ms. B. (Miss and Mrs. seem to have gone out of favor.) Even established writers who would be open to taking a husband's name are still writers, coming at the question from the perspective of someone who has a name that means something already to a great many strangers.

My own thoughts about the compatibility of feminism and name-change, which I've probably already discussed here, are as follows: The performance of gender is something we all must do along the lines we feel comfortable with. If someone born male feels female, she's a woman. If someone born female feels female but prefers pants to dresses and short hair to long, this variant of female self-presentation should be accepted. These are not statements about financial independence or lack thereof, career ambition or lack thereof, but seemingly superficial trappings with which we demonstrate gender identity. 

It follows that if a feminist woman wants to play 'the woman' in one or more ways consistent with traditional gender norms (and that could be name-change, makeup-wearing, etc.), she should engage in a bit of hand-wringing over whether this is really her desire or social norms, but may end up concluding that this is how she feels comfortable. And then that's what she has to do. Depending her milieu, she's either doing what everyone hoped she'd do anyway, or feeling as though she must defend her decision to disappointed peers. That's where the whole 'it was my father's name anyway' or 'his name just happens to be nicer' discussions arise. 'I choose, in this area, to play the woman' never seems to be an option, even if that's probably closest to the truth.

When someone's gender-self-presentation matches up with traditional expectations, these things can never be separated out entirely - what's culture, and what's me? Where we want to get, as a society - and here I borrow from Dan Savage, who explained this so well in a recent interview I'm forgetting where - is to a place where the boys who play with dolls are accepted, but so too is the likely fact that most people will feel the same drive to perform the expected gender-roles (at least to a degree) as that boy does to play with Barbies. Of course it's all subjective - of course if we lived in a society with different naming systems, there wouldn't be women performing femininity by changing their names. But we live in the society we do, and that's what's going on.