Abstract
AbstractWhether 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.
Highlights
Social science researchers have given some attention to the empirical exploration of social factors related to women's last name choices at the time of marriage, many questions remain unanswered
A question that has not been adequately addressed is whether or not there has been a trend in recent years towards women making a nonconventional marital surname choice
Our intent was to add to the body of knowledge on surname choice at the time of marriage by examining non-conventional surname choices over time
Summary
Social science researchers have given some attention to the empirical exploration of social factors related to women's last name choices at the time of marriage, many questions remain unanswered. There are a number of reasons to expect that there has been a trend in recent decades towards less conventional marital surname choices by women. In previous studies (Johnson and Scheuble 1995; 1996), these factors have been found to relate to women's choosing to keep their birth name at the time of marriage or to hyphenate their surnames with those of their husbands. Previous studies have not addressed a possible trend towards increasing rates of non-conventional marital name choice. In this article we explore historical trends in marital name choice by analyzing data gathered from 2,163 wedding announcements reported in The New York Times Sunday edition for the 30 year period from 1966 to 1996. We examine the effects of employment, education, wedding location, and month of marriage on marital name choice
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