iStockAdvertisement - Continue Reading BelowWhen I got married five months ago, there was an overwhelming number of decisions to make: big ones, small ones, utterly innocuous ones. Where? Band or DJ? Cake or cupcakes? The only choices I didn't second-guess at least once were the guy I'd chosen to be my husband and that I'd be keeping my own name.
Thankfully, nobody has really argued the former—my mom, my friends, even my hairdresser have all embraced Adam with reckless abandon, but everyone, it seems, has an opinion about the latter. One they're not afraid to share.
More From ELLEThe first sign was a gift that arrived a week after our wedding: Two matching mugs, adorned with photos of me and Adam leaving the reception, grinning like maniacs, while being showered with rice. "The Lisbergs. 3.27.09," the cups trumpeted.
We laughed, put them in the cabinet, and, since there was no card, took turns placing bets on which retrograde great-aunt had been the sender...until the following day, when I received a voicemail from my younger sister: "Did you like the mugs I sent?"
At first I thought maybe she didn't realize that I'd made a conscious decision to remain a Sloan. Wrong again.
"Katie, they're adorable, it's just—you know I'm not changing my name, right?"
"Carrie, that's what everyone's going to call you anyway," she said firmly, as if I were being ridiculous.
It turns out my little sister might be onto something. According to a newly released study out of Indiana University, 70 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that a woman should take her husband's name when she marries.
The results have been widely reported across the media, and it will probably be mere weeks before a clever designer creates burning bras for us to hurl at one another on Facebook in solidarity. But to merely stand slack-jawed before the stats misses the greater meaning the survey has to offer—namely, interesting insight into who changes her name, who doesn't, and why we all have such strong feelings about the issue.
The study, "Constructing the Family in the 21st Century," was conducted by the Center of Survey Research at Indiana University and surveyed 815 randomly selected Americans; however, it's important to note that just under half of respondents came from within the conservative state of Indiana. Whether that influenced the survey results is a source of some contention.
"They were interesting questions, but that's not a random sample of the U.S.," cautions Claudia Goldin, the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard, who read the study while considering it for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
But the survey is still an accurate reflection of how Americans on the whole feel, say its authors. "We were worried about that too," says Laura Hamilton, a sociology researcher at the University of Indiana and a lead author of the study, who says they compared their findings with other larger national surveys and found, if anything, that their respondents were on average more liberal.
"It seems that, nope, although we would like to see more liberal views, this is what we found," she says.
What both Goldin and Hamilton agree on is that the juiciest part of the findings don't involve number crunching at all. In fact, the survey was the first to analyze not only "practices" related to name changing—how many women are "changers" versus "keepers"—but "attitudes." Rather than merely checking a box, respondents explained how they felt about the issue at length during phone interviews.
"What was previously known is what people actually do," says Hamilton. "Ninety to 95 percent of women in the U.S. currently change their name. There wasn't a lot more to say about that." But when they made the questions open-ended, suddenly a treasure trove of information came pouring out.
About one quarter of survey respondents who said a woman should change her name added that they thought she should do so to have a marital identity connected to her husband. "Once they got married, they should give up their own identity and become part of him," says Hamilton.
The problem is that I, like so many women who marry in their thirties, already have an identity of my own—not to mention, as a writer, a last name intrinsically linked to my livelihood. And in that respect, I tend to track with the trends. "Women are marrying later, and they have a life before they're married," says Goldin. "Women who marry early are more likely to be changers."
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