Keeping a surname reads as a statement, so it carries a cost changing does not

The argument

Proponents of this explanation start from an asymmetry in how the two choices are received. Taking a husband's surname is treated as the unremarkable thing to have done and prompts no comment; keeping one's own is treated as a decision, and a decision invites an inference about why it was made. Advocates argue that this asymmetry is the whole of the mechanism, because it means the two options are not equally costly even where they are equally available. The cost they identify is reputational rather than material. On this account keeping a surname is widely read as signalling a position on marriage, on tradition and on the relationship between the spouses, and women who hold no such position, or who hold it but do not wish to announce it, find themselves credited with one anyway. Supporters argue that the label most often attached is that of being too feminist, and that it is understood to carry consequences in exactly the settings where a newly married woman has least room to manoeuvre. Advocates draw the conclusion that the persistence of the practice need not reflect agreement with it. A woman can regard the convention as outdated and still change her name, because what she is avoiding is not the alternative itself but the reading others will place on it. Supporters hold that this is why the practice has outlasted the beliefs that produced it: the convention no longer has to be endorsed to be followed, only to be the option that attracts no explanation.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics argue that the account treats women as responding to pressure rather than exercising preference, and that many who change their names describe the decision in terms that have nothing to do with avoiding a label. They also note that in places where keeping a surname is now common the supposed stigma has not produced the predicted effect. A further objection is that the mechanism cannot easily explain why the practice persists among women who are openly feminist in every other respect.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] In many settings keeping a surname now passes without comment, so the asymmetry the argument relies on is weakening or absent. [Rejecting P2] Inferences drawn from the choice vary widely, and the specific label described is only one of several and not the most common. [Rejecting P3] An anticipated reputational cost is easy to assert and hard to distinguish from a simple preference for the convention. [Rejecting C] If avoiding explanation were the driver, the practice should fall away wherever explanations are no longer demanded, which is not generally what happens.