They never thought they’d change last names. Here’s why they ultimately did

In certain circles, the stereotype of a woman who takes her husband’s last name is that she’s a traditionalist, or a ride-or-die for the patriarchy – the type of woman who might doodle her married name in a notebook like a schoolgirl with a crush. The Save America Act, which passed the House early this year and has been criticised for its potential to disenfranchise married women voters who have changed their last names, has – despite stalling in the Senate – prompted conversations about the custom’s downsides.

It’s true that the practice of a woman taking her husband’s last name is rooted in a patriarchal law, called coverture, which originated in 13th-century England and dictated that a woman only existed, legally speaking, in relation to her father and then to her husband.

But that doesn’t quite explain why, in 21st-century America, the tradition is still so prevalent. Almost 80% of women in opposite-sex marriages take their husbands’ last names, according to a 2023 poll from the Pew Research Center. That number goes up to 86% for white women, with women over the age of 50 being the most likely to say they took the name of their husband after marriage.

“Even with the current era, where the calls for gender equality have grown within the US, still most women in opposite-sex marriages said they took their spouse’s last name when they got married,” said Luona Lin, a research associate at the Pew Research Center.

However, there are hints that things are changing. Pew’s data indicates that younger women (ages 18 to 49), women with advanced degrees, Hispanic women and those who identify as Democrats are more likely to say they kept their last names after marriage; or if they were not yet married, they were likely to keep their names after they wed.

“You can sort of look at how the trend might be headed by looking at the [data],” Lin said.

But data never tells the whole story. Many women, like Garcia, take the name of their husband for reasons that have almost nothing to do with their spouses.

For Garcia, who has written under her maiden name for shows including One Day at a Time and The Bold Type, the choice to take Eddie’s name came down to the fact that she felt a much stronger connection to him than the man who gave her the name Levich.

“I don’t have a relationship with my dad,” she said, adding that she will use Garcia professionally going forward. “So at the end of the day, of these two names that represented men, I chose which one I wanted to represent.”

The same was true for Kate Chin Park, who took the opportunity of her 2021 wedding to pick the name that best reflected her evolving sense of self.

Born Kathleen Nancy Leiserson, Chin Park had already been considering a name change when she and her boyfriend got engaged. She had been married once before and did not take her first husband’s name. But then, “in my late 20s and early 30s, my first marriage had ended, and I was thinking about my relationship to my family history,” said Chin Park, now 44 and a puzzles editor at the New Yorker. Her mother’s maiden name is Chin.

“I liked the concept of connecting with my mum specifically, and also my mom’s Chinese heritage,” Chin Park said.

Chin Park describes her relationship with her father as “complicated”. When she got married again, she decided that she wanted “my name to be a reflection of, in part, my own heritage and the things that matter to me, and in part the life that I’m choosing for myself”.

Far from disappearing into her husband’s identity, Chin Park said that picking a new name “felt like one of the biggest decisions I’ve made in my life in terms of just autonomy.”

She loves her new moniker, from its attractive symmetry to the fact that some friends and colleagues now call her KCP, like Philadelphia shooting guard Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. She plans to keep it even though she and her husband are now in the process of getting divorced.

“This so feels like me,” Chin Park said.

For Janelle Rupkalvis, 33, the decision about whether to take her husband’s last name came down to one factor: travel.

She built a successful engineering career under the name Rupkalvis but recently has been focused on content creation. When she married Austin Bartlett in October 2025, she realised that she never again wanted to feel the way she had when crossing the border to Canada every summer as a child.

“I thought about my experiences travelling as an unaccompanied minor on flights from Minneapolis, where I’m from, to Toronto, where I’d be picked up by my grandparents,” said Rupkalvis, who now lives in Seattle and is in the process of legally changing her last name to Bartlett. Because her grandparents had a different last name (Thompson) than her and her younger brother, “I would have all this documentation.”

Now considering parenthood, Rupkalvis – who describes herself as “very vocally feminist” – said she never wants anyone to second-guess her relationship to her eventual brood. “Travel has always been an important part of my life, and I hope to be able to share that with any future children,” she said. “I would never want a situation to occur where there’s a split second where my identity to them or my relationship to them is in question.”

It’s the same for Joanna Nagashima, who remembers friction growing up because her mother had a different last name than her and her siblings.

Nagashima, born Ma in the San Francisco Bay Area, said people frequently questioned her mother’s relationship to their family, whether at school pick-up or at the insurance industry conferences they attended for her parents’ jobs.

“I was a little bit self-conscious about the impression that others had about us not being a cohesive family unit,” said the 34-year-old project manager, who has been married for three years and has a 1-year-old daughter. “I think it’s very common for Asian women to keep their maiden names, but I grew up in a primarily Caucasian neighbourhood, and a lot of the time I was often the only Asian kid in my class growing up, so there were a lot of assumptions.”

She kept Ma as her middle name but has no second thoughts about becoming a Nagashima: “It’s just not something I would want for my kids.”

Erin Eichenstein had no complaints about her original name: it was short, common and extremely easy to spell. But then an incident at the airport in college changed her feelings about it forever.

“It was 2001, and I was coming back from studying abroad [in Ireland],” said Eichenstein, who declined to give her original name due to a complicated history with it. “I was stopped at customs, and they didn’t really tell me what was happening, they just brought me into a back room. I was sitting there forever. And I was like, ‘What is going on?’”

Eichenstein, now 45, was questioned for hours about places she had never been all throughout the South. Eventually, she was told she shared a full name, birthdate and most of a Social Security number with a woman who was wanted for multiple serious charges, including aggravated assault.

“I kind of thought that it was a one-off,” recalled Eichenstein, who lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two daughters. “It became a story that came up at parties and bars.”

But then it kept happening, almost every time she travelled outside the United States. Exasperated, Eichenstein asked a friend in law enforcement how she might avoid this issue in the future.

“He was like, ‘Change your name,’” Eichenstein said.

She did just that and was never detained at the border again. Although she likes sharing a last name with her family, she still gets nostalgic for her old one. “I still miss the simplicity of my maiden name,” she said. “Occasionally I’ll see it in certain places … and I’m like, ‘Oh, I remember that feeling as to why I didn’t want to change it.’”

Jennifer Heller had no intention of changing her name, either.

And she didn’t, not for years after marrying her husband in 1988 and the births of their two children. As a newspaper reporter living in Brooklyn in the late 1990s, Heller said, “it wasn’t even a discussion” that she would be called anything but Jennifer Shaw. “They used to call me Shaw in the office,” she said. “I had worked really hard to … get that byline.”

Then came the day that would alter so many lives, in ways big and small.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Heller, now 64, was at work in the building formerly known as One World Financial Centre, just a few blocks from the twin towers. When the planes hit, Heller and her colleagues at the Wall Street Journal made a “terrifying” rush down the stairs from their offices on the 11th floor.

“I really didn’t know if I was going to make it out of my building or home … and all of a sudden I thought, ‘I am going to die and my tombstone is going to say Jennifer Shaw, and there’s not even going to be a body in it, and my kids are going to come, and it’s not going to say their name,’” Heller recalled.

She made it to safety, but she had left her wallet, with all of her identification, behind on her desk. In the days following the terrorist attacks, she started the process of legally changing her name.

“That was a private moment of truth,” Heller said. “And it’s a pain because nobody knows what my name is – half the people call me Shaw, half the people call me Heller – but that is what I had to do.”

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