The Name Game
21 November 2002, 4:27 PM

In response to a thread about hyphenated names on a feminist listserv I'm on:

One solution I considered when I was still thinking of having kids was to simply keep my last name. If I had a girl, she'd get my last name. If I had a boy, he'd get his father's last name. That way names would get passed from mother to daughter and father to son.

It's interesting that this topic came up since I chose a journal article about "Perceptions of Married People with Hyphenated Names" for my sociology paper. (We had to review a sociological article.) I was actually surprised to see that the sample population had very *positive* perceptions of both men and women who had hyphenated last names. But I wonder how well this maps to the U.S. population at large. Are hyphenated names widely accepted and positively viewed now in 2002? And the article didn't talk at all about hyphenated names that crossed ethnic and religious borders.

Hrm. I smell a new reserch project....