In other studies by Goldin, women without children have about the same rates of name keeping. Goldin hasn’t repeated her study with more recent numbers. And that means she hasn’t examined the practice of Massachusetts women who, since 2004, have married other women.

A study of Massachusetts birth records showed that only 13 percent of white, married, college-graduate women, age 30 to 34, and having their first child in 2000 kept their given name, down from 17 percent in 1995 and 20.8 percent in 1990. (Name-hyphenators were a minuscule percent of the total.) Claudia Goldin, the Harvard economics professor who coauthored the study, found that among 25- to 29-year-old white, married women with no college degree having their first child in 2000, only 3.1 percent kept their given name after marriage; it was 4.6 percent in 1995 and 4.3 percent in 1990. Black, married, college-graduate women, age 30 to 34, having their first child between 1996 and 2000, however, kept their names 34.2 percent of the time. Goldin notes that black women without a college degree kept their names at about the same rate as college-educated black women.

Conventional wisdom holds that Del Genio’s choice is typical for modern, heterosexual women who have a college degree and marry several years or more into a successful career. But the truth is that a married woman who keeps her original name is rare, and getting rarer.

She did, however, plan on changing it when they had kids. They had kids. The name stayed. She planned on changing it when the kids started school. Kids started school, name stayed. Eventually, she remembers, her husband said to her, “ ‘Who are you kidding? You’re never going to change your name.’ In the end, I’m glad I kept my name. I like my name.”

Growing up, Jessica Del Genio hated her last name. Surrounded by Smiths and Robertsons and Mitchells, she felt her Italian surname branded her family as immigrants. She couldn’t wait until the day she got married and could change it. But somewhere between her discontented youth and the day she married her husband (who, although he didn’t want it used in this story, has a last name “I would have killed for when I was a kid,” she says), Del Genio developed a very successful business as a color and material stylist. When the big day came in 2002, Del Genio decided not to change her name, after all. “The primary reason I kept it was for professional reasons,” says Del Genio, a 42-year-old living in West Roxbury. “I’m a specialist. If I changed my name, people would be like ‘Who?’ ”

As a woman who did it, I can honestly say that I’m not sure. I made the decision standing in line at Boston City Hall, filling out our marriage license application. I didn’t realize until that moment that I would have to declare my name intentions on that document, and I felt ambushed. I thought I’d have time to figure it out once we got married. So I punted. My last name became my middle, and I took my husband’s last name.

I still use my maiden name professionally -- it’s my brand. (Goldin says female journalists are among those most likely to keep their given name at marriage.) I love my husband’s last name, but after nearly seven years, it still doesn’t feel like mine. I don’t use it very often. If I had to do it over again, I would not have changed it, because it caused more headaches than it cured. Even after I explain my situation, some clients continue to put the wrong name on paychecks and hotel and flight reservations. My friends are never sure how to introduce me. Name changing is a nice tradition. I felt that my husband and I created a family unified under a single flag, but if I’m brutally honest, changing my name made no sense for me.

But it made a lot of sense for Christine Valutkevich and her husband, Mark. “I didn’t ever consider not taking his name,” says the 41-year-old Hopkinton woman, who married in 2006 and has two daughters. “I felt it was one more concrete thing on paper that made us a couple.”

Nor do some women who take a husband’s name feel they’re damaging the cause of feminism or having their identity subsumed. “I feel very confident that I am my own person,” says 33-year-old Patricia Sheedy of Boston, who has a Harvard MBA and married RJ in 2007. The couple have a son. “I don’t see my name as my identity. I see who I am as my identity,” she says. “My name was just a label, and it didn’t bother me at all.”