When lawyer Miriam González Durántez took to Instagram to lampoon the absurdity of being invited to participate in an International Women’s Day event with a letter starting “Dear Mrs Clegg”, it was immediately clear why she described the situation as one of “irony”. The organisers had chosen to define her by her husband (former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg) while asking her to speak at an event to celebrate women’s success.

But according to one study, many people might disagree with González Durántez’s right to continue using her maiden name at all. Researchers polling US adults found that 70% thought women should take their husband’s name when they marry and half felt women should be legally obliged to do so.

Another study published this month in the journal Gender Issues suggested that anxiety about women’s surnames after marriage goes deeper than semantics. It found that, among some men, a woman with a different surname to her husband is seen as being a less committed wife, and that her husband would be more justified in divorcing her than a man whose wife had taken his surname.



The ongoing debate reflects deeper anxieties. Particularly in the US, where a 2004 survey found 94% of women take their husbands’ surnames after marriage, there has been something of a moral panic about the idea of married women retaining independence. When research revealed in 2013 that 40% of American mothers are now their family’s sole or primary breadwinner, Fox News pundits described the situation as unnatural, “terribly wrong”, “hurting our children” and “tearing us apart”.



Numerous online commentators have bemoaned the ways in which feminism “demeans women and destroys families”, or argued that it is simply “wrong for kids not to have their father’s surname”. Now, a book due out this month, entitled The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men and Marriage, claims that “society is creating a new crop of alpha women who are unable to love”. Yielding to one’s husband, the author, Suzanne Venker, argues, is key to mastering “wifedom”, to which modern “alpha women” are poorly suited because they have “become too masculine”, having been “groomed to be leaders rather than to be wives”.

In this telling, women have to chose between being leaders or wives; loving mothers or selfish careerists; family nurturers or destructive breadwinners; devoted partners or maiden-named harpies.



Yet all common sense suggests that, far from heralding hell and damnation, women keeping their own names and mothers earning more money are signs of societal progress. It’s nonsense to suggest that women who want to keep their own surnames or continue working after childbirth love their husbands any less or care less for their children. If anything, we might need to start bringing societal expectations for the behaviour of a loving wife or mother into line with behaviour that has been perfectly acceptable for men in the same situation for decades.

When is a man ever accused of jeopardising his family’s wellbeing because he chooses to continue working after his children are born? Or of being uncommitted to his marriage because he chooses to keep his own surname? If such standards sound utterly ridiculous when applied to men, there’s a strong likelihood that we shouldn’t be holding women to them either. If shared family nomenclature is really so vitally important to the fabric of society, perhaps we should ask why more men aren’t taking their wives’ surnames.



But I bet that Nick Clegg has never been invited to speak at an event with a letter beginning “Dear Mr González Durántez”.