Women's Last Names

Improved Essays
The article, “Women’s and Men’s Preferences for First and Last Names”, was a psychological research study done by Pacific Lutheran University. The premise was to first determine the favorability of men and women’s first name and also their last name. They wanted to measure how connected men were with their first names and how well women were with their first names. As they predicted, the results came out almost evenly across the participants measured in the United States giving testament that your first name was a huge part of your identity in letting others, who may not see you, know your gender or maybe even your ethnicity. Nonetheless, whatever the reasons were that they chose, the results yielded equal. However, their studies gave significant …show more content…
From a social conflict approach, the concern might be that although changing of women’s last name is tradition, there were legalistic aspects for women changing their last name in the past. In the 1800’s and 1900’s it was necessary for women to change their last name since women were not allowed to own property, take out lines of credit, or make contracts in their maiden name. If they were married, they were able to do these things, but under their husband’s name. These laws have now changed, and it is legal for women to do all of these things with or without their husband’s last name. So continuing to make women change their last name, or not ever change a man’s last name if the woman wants to, shows the true inequality in the matter. Without question, women are constantly looked at, as the subordinate group in marriage and men are dominant over their wives. Another issue of concern is that many women have established themselves for years and many times decades by this name, and now that they have fallen in love, you are asking them to give this identity away. Women a lot of times want to keep their last names for many reasons. Some of those include that they either really like their last name, they are very logical and aware of the divorce rate in the United States even though that’s not what they want, or they are established in the professional world, and changing their name would cause a lot of confusion for many co-workers and clients, and maybe even loss of business. This perspective does bring light to me to the true conflict of the issue that was not perceived before I took this course. My mindset was that is tradition and the way of doing things, and the only exception was if you were a celebrity with a big name that everyone knew. The social conflict approach makes you question why is the man’s name

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