Tradition Never Goes Out of Style: The Role of Tradition in Women’s Naming Practices

Abstract

The goal of this project is to explore why, given United States women’s historical struggle to gain legal and social acceptance of nontraditional naming forms, the overwhelming majority of women continue to follow tradition and adopt their husbands’ names upon marriage. To begin to explain this phenomenon, this study focused on Catholic women, who changed their names between 1940 and 1998. This article illustrates the role tradition plays in participants’ worldview and how tradition influences their behavior and attitudes toward naming practices. The naming behaviors and attitudes of the women in this study are then analyzed within a larger sociocultural and political context.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Andrea Press, Daena Goldsmith, Peggy Miller, and Cheris Kramarae for their feedback and guidance on the work presented here. Any remaining errors are my own.

Notes

1 A priest at the cathedral.

2 Researchers on women’s naming practices customarily treat those with their birth name as their middle name as a discrete group. This study did not do so. When I recruited participants, I explicitly stated that the principle criterion for participation was that the woman had changed her name to her husband’s. Participants in this study who use their birth name as their middle name saw themselves as fulfilling this criterion. I did not learn they were using their birth names as middle names until they told their name change narratives. I feel it best represents these participants’ own experiences of their naming practices to keep them in the category in which they identified themselves as members.