Why I Will Never Change My Last Name After Marriage
When I was around three-four years old, I learned how to spell my name. Sitting on the dark blue island in our kitchen one afternoon, light streaming in from our sliding glass door, my parents helped me spell ‘Shannon Sutorius’ over and over again on a piece of paper. I remember the elation I felt when I finally got the whole thing right (writing out letters was quite hard after all — especially with a last name like mine!), laughing and running around the room with my piece of paper. I was Shannon Sutorius. I would always be Shannon Sutorius.
Soon after that, although I’m not sure exactly when, I learned that when women get married, they are expected to take their new husband’s surnames. I’m almost positive I learned this from some TV show where the girl has a crush and writes her name as “Mrs. [Crush’s Last Name]” in her notebook 100 times to symbolize her deep infatuation and fantasizing of their future together. As a girl, up to that point, I had been inundated with images and thoughts of the future women were expected to have —falling in love with a handsome boy as a teenager, marriage, having babies together, and taking care of our home by cooking, cleaning, and raising those babies. Maybe I could be a nanny or schoolteacher on the side, although only for Elementary-aged students since, again, being a woman is about looking after children.
If you think perhaps I am exaggerating because after all, I am only 22, go look at the toy section of your local Walmart or Target. Despite the push for more gender-neutral play, the sections are still clearly divided between the flowery pink of girl’s toys and the harsh dark blues of the boy’s, even if they don’t say that directly. In that girl’s section, it looks virtually the same as to when I was five: baby dolls that can you can feed and change, Easy-Bakes, children’s makeup, and over-glamorized dolls that usually have companion boy ones. Although I don’t think play on its own is harmful in any way, nor would I advocate for getting rid of ‘homemaking’ play that all children benefit from, the point is that play that children explore is an extension of our world and its values. It is a way for children to conceptualize their past, present, and eventual futures. While now we make dolls of Rey from Star Wars and Wonder Woman, or Barbie has a veterinary set, that is but a drop in the bucket to the overall message to girls: your destiny is still in the home, attached to a man.
Soon enough, it becomes clear that being attached to a man means also taking his name. No longer are you you, but rather, Mr and Mrs. John Smith. Your identity to the outside world is squared down to your marriage. This is sold to girls and young women as something romantic. It may be old-fashioned, but you’re in love! You’re a couple — a union! Why wouldn’t you want to celebrate that fact by taking his name and displaying proudly how in love you are and how fantastic your marriage will be?
Nevermind the fact that taking your husband’s name is hardly a celebration with all the legal paperwork required, nor does it prove or solidify any love you share (usually the actual celebration of a marriage ceremony accomplishes that), but “old-fashioned” is quite an understatement. The history of women taking their husband’s surnames is rooted in the legal concept of “coverture,” which mandated that once women married, they were “covered” by their husbands legally and therefore, his property. This was not a choice, but the law. Women were not considered human individuals with rights, but rather, akin to the way pets are viewed. While yes, the shelter that you adopted your dog from gave it a very nice name, it’s your dog now, and therefore, you changed its name once the adoption was complete. Plus, maybe your name was better anyway. The same logic.
I have known many women, my own mother, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers included, who have taken their husband’s last name, whether by their choice or through legal force in the case of my grandmothers. I don’t fault any woman for making the choice to change her name to her husband’s surname, and I am aware of the more “modern” options of hyphenation and name combining. Even friends of mine who aren’t married or even in a relationship have talked to me about it, telling me their reasons about why they will be changing their surnames, ranging from simple “I don’t like my last name” to “I like getting creative and making a combination of our surnames would be fun.” I am thankful that it is a choice rather than the requirement. All those things set aside, the history behind the practice and continued discussion about the need for any surname change at all by either spouse negates the feeling of choice altogether.
From the moment I found out about the expectation for a name change when I got married, I had felt my heart sink. I loved my last name; my beautiful, unique, difficult to spell and pronounce last name. My whole name felt so complete with its S-S alliteration. It was a talking point the first day of school, at parties, or even just meeting someone for the first time. While I once went to a name lookup booth at the State Fair to see the origins of “Sutorius” (the results were that it was traced back to the 1800’s in Germany to shoemakers), different explanations of the origin of the name lived inside my family, from Italian roots to one speculating it traced back to Ancient Greek historian and writer Suetonius. A teacher in high school once commented it sounded like the name of a Norse god (my father once claimed we have Norwegian ancestry, making the moment feel extra special). I am one of only two Shannon Sutoriuses in the entire world, the other one living in Utah who seemingly married into her name. I am the only Shannon Sutorius to have ever been born as such in the history of this world.
Yet in the background, there was no discussion of ‘if’ my last name would change when I got married, but ‘when’ and ‘to what.’ Relatives discussed openly that my father must have been “disappointed” (he never was — and in fact told me over and over that he always wanted a little girl) that I couldn’t carry on the family name but that thankfully my male cousin could. Even on my mother’s side, having boys was more encouraged and mothers without them were always prodded to try “just one more time” for a boy. My parents would get letters addressed to them (and still do) as “Mr and Mrs. William Sutorius,” no mention of my mother’s first name anywhere. At a wedding I went to as a teenager, when the bride was introduced with her new last name, I overheard two older women gossip to each other about how they were proud of her for “changing her mind” about keeping her birth name and not “giving in to the feminists.” From when I was in 1st grade to up until I graduated high school, girls talked about it amongst ourselves all the time. Questions rattled my child brain: Would my future husband’s name sound as nice as mine? Would it be unique or something common, like ‘Brown?’ Would I even like it? Would it start with an ‘S’ so I could at least keep that aspect about myself?
At some point during high school, I had decided I was done with the anxiety of it all. Something in the back of my brain, ever since I originally began to think about changing my name upon marriage, had asked a question I never entertained until then: what if I just didn’t change it at all? What if I stayed Shannon Sutorius forever? It was also during this time I began to openly identify as bisexual, and the beginning of being authentically and unapologetically myself was fully in motion. The reasons I would fall in love, and someone would fall in love with me, would be because I was wholly this person. If someone truly loved me, they would love this last name too, and they would love my reasons for keeping it. In that moment, I truly discovered that the pressure on women to decide about changing their surnames after marriage amounted to little more than a holdover ritual of patriarchy.
Nonetheless, I write this because I know I am not alone. The pressure on women, even if the entire idea seems silly, is very real and needs to be talked about. I know because I’ve seen it up-close. Friends of mine, from all genders, are shocked by my firmness in my decision. Some ask if it’s even allowed. There is always a little digging to see if I’ll budge — “not even hyphenation?” Nope! Similarly, men I go on dates with (would you be surprised to know the women I’ve dated are always cool with it?) who’ve never had to think about their future wife’s opinion on the matter are suddenly struck with confronting it. Some men react with interest, one even offering playfully to take my surname, while some others stubbornly dismiss it as the “radical feminist agenda” or something similar. These are men I do not see again, obviously, but like the toy section, it reveals something unspoken about how our culture asks us to conceptualize and politicize the identity in even just our names.
The politics of naming has even more significance today as more and more trans and nonbinary people become visible in our society. Their struggle, though much deeper and currently harder-fought than cis women’s, is not dissimilar to the marriage-surname-change discussion. The politicization of authenticity, choice, and gender becomes distilled in a debate about names and naming, reducing individuals down to what their identity can symbolize to a culture, rather than a celebration of their uniqueness. It becomes radical to even exist as a genuine version of yourself. Being genuinely myself is all I can ever do though, and for that reason, with or without a spouse, I will always be Shannon Sutorius.
