Back in the medieval ages when a woman was married to a man, they were basically considered property for my understanding and treated like an extension of the man’s person and family. So it was customary for women to take the man’s last name since they were being joined to his family. But now here in the 21st century women are fully independent and last names don’t really seem to mean much of anything. I mean what is Smith or McGregor or any last name really mean anymore? Especially in the digital age, lots of people have digital usernames like SarahSmith1727373. So the last name clearly doesn’t mean much anymore… Which leads me to wonder, why do the majority of women still take the man’s last name? Especially when some of them have a horrible last name? I have seen some butt ass ugly last names recently, like Fink, Weimer, Slotsky/Slotsky, Hiscock (no joke this is a last name), Hardman… And then you hear the woman’s name and it’s like something way more reasonable and less stupid sounding like Kingman, or Harrison, Walls, etc.

  • SybilVane@lemmy.ca
    1·
    1 month ago

    Nothing too complex. I come from a culture where you take one last name from each parent. No hyphen. Just FirstName LastName1 LastName2.

    Some systems put LastName1 as my middle name and shortened it to one letter. Some excluded LastName2. Some squished both last names into one name, sometimes with a hyphen, sometimes not.

    But because every system did its own thing, no one could ever find me. I had 2 different credit scores at one point. I received 3 voting cards every election, all of them wrong, despite the fact that every election cycle I would take the hours it takes to report the errors and get them to “fix” it. I was enrolled twice in one class in grade 4 under two separate wrong names. And whatever name my high school used on their system, I wasn’t showing up when universities searched for my records, so I kept getting rejection letter after rejection letter with no explanation and it took me months to track down the cause and have it fixed, by which point it was too late to get into several schools. I also couldn’t buy certain things online because some stores’ paymentet methods wouldn’t let me put in the name of my credit card as it was written. Oh, and the government couldn’t get the name on my social insurance card and the name on my taxes to match. This affected my online logins, so I would need to call on the phone to verify myself for each tax-related transaction, including simple address changes.