Trends in Women's Marital Name Choices: 1966–1996

Abstract

Whether or not women have been more likely to select non-conventional marital surnames in more recent years has received little attention in the marital naming literature. We examine marital name choices in more than 2,000 wedding announcements reported over a thirty year period in The New York Times. Women were more likely to have chosen non-conventional marital names in the late 1980s and 1990s than in the 1960s and 1970s. Furthermore, unlike women who changed their last names to those of their husbands, women selecting non-conventional last names were more likely to be employed, to have higher levels of education and to be married in non-church locations.