Maiden Names, on the Rise Again

When Donna Suh married in September, wearing a short white dress at San Francisco City Hall, she decided to keep her last name. Her reasons were practical, not political.

“It’s not necessarily a feminist reason, but it’s just my name for 33 years of my life,” Ms. Suh said. “Plus, I’m Asian and he’s not, so it’s less confusing for me to not have a white name. And on social media I thought it might be harder to find me.”

The practice of keeping one’s maiden name after marriage — which appears to have declined sometime in the 1980s or 1990s — has begun rising again, according to an Upshot analysis of data from multiple sources. The share has surpassed that of the 1970s. Yet unlike in that Ms. Decade, the decision now tends to be less political. For many women, sociologists say, keeping their maiden names has lost its significance in defining their independence and its symbolism as a feminist act.

Roughly 20 percent of women married in recent years have kept their names, according to a Google Consumer Survey conducted by The Upshot. (An additional 10 percent or so chose a third option, such as hyphenating their name or legally changing it while continuing to use their birth name professionally.)

By comparison, about 17 percent of women who married for the first time in the 1970s kept their names, a number that fell to 14 percent in the more conservative 1980s before rising to 18 percent in the 1990s, the Google survey shows. These numbers should be viewed as estimates, not precise counts, but the overall trend is apparent across several data sources.

A separate analysis of New York Times wedding announcements (which cover a select, less representative share of women) showed similar patterns. Last year, 29.5 percent of women in the wedding pages kept their name, up from 26 percent in 2000 and a recent low of 16.2 percent in 1990.