What is it about?
An empirical study of what British women do with their last name on marriage - changing names or keeping their original/birth name - and the ways in which this decision affects their sense of who they are. There is a real focus on gendered identity and how decisions around names are a part of creating and recreating gender.
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Why is it important?
This work looks at an everyday, taken-for-granted practice of heterosexual marriages and digs down to why this practice continues to be important. It sheds light on contemporary British social organisation and how gender remains an important part of organising people within society and forming identities.
Perspectives
Names remain a really significant way of organising people but one we frequently ignore. Gender is also such an important way in which people understand themselves and others, but is constructed in so many ways. This article therefore links up gender and names as means of organising people and building identities and shows the significance of this to understanding our society.
Dr Rachel Thwaites
University of Lincoln
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The making of selfhood: naming decisions on marriage, Families Relationships and Societies, November 2013, Policy Press,
DOI: 10.1332/204674313x665913.
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