Like the actresses Lauren Bacall and Tara Fitzgerald, who assumed their mother’s maiden name after their parents divorced, or Michéal Richardson who switched his surname from Neeson to honour his mother, actress Natasha Richardson, after she died in 2009, my children could one day make a similar decision and choose to incorporate my family name in some way with theirs.
It would be a hat tip, if nothing else, to my family heritage and the hard work I’ve put in as primary carer over the years, but would also crucially call into question a tradition that seems hugely outdated.
After all, in today’s modern society where around 60 per cent of women in the UK describe themselves as feminists and most women work and have established careers before marriage, why do we simply allow our family names to be erased and subsumed by another?
The biggest push against name-taking came in the tradition-breaking 1970s, a period when in many states of the US, the laws still shockingly required a woman to use her husband’s name to vote, bank or get a passport, making keeping one’s maiden name a key tenet of the women’s movement.
The campaign worked and the share of women who kept their own surname after marriage rose from three per cent in 1975 to 20 per cent three decades later.
But in the UK, a large swathe of society can’t seem to conceive a reality beyond patrilineal surnames.
According to a 2016 UK survey, almost 90 per cent of British women adopt their husband’s family name when they get married, with around 85 per cent of those aged between 18 and 30 saying they still follow the practice.
This leaves us trailing behind our European neighbours, with women in Spain and Iceland, for example, predominantly keeping their birth names when they marry and Greece making it a legal requirement for wives to retain their names for life since 1983.
Just like fathers giving away brides and men being more likely to propose, name-taking here in Britain is a patriarchal tradition that seems entrenched, even amongst modern women, as romantic and old-fashioned.
We may be all for gender equality and annihilating the pay gap but adopting our husband’s name so we can be seen as a proper family doesn’t feel like such a big deal. It’s practical and less fiddly with paperwork when booking holidays or hotel rooms. It symbolises commitment ties you and your children together as a unit – what’s so wrong with that?
And yet Hamilton’s announcement shows that the next generation might feel a little differently.
Already we see a growing trend for a third way with 11 per cent of young newlyweds now combining names and passing them onto their kids – the double-barrelled name acting as the perfect expression of an equal partnership. Many are also using a mother’s maiden name as a middle name like Hillary Rodham Clinton or even splicing two names together like Dawn Porter, who adopted the mash-up surname O’Porter after her marriage to actor Chris O’Dowd.
Children are born from two parents and two distinct family heritages and want their names to reflect that.
Here’s hoping my boys may feel the same.
