Increasingly, women are choosing to keep their maiden names when they get married, shunning the tradition that says a woman should adopt her husband’s surname once they wed.
While this might seem like a very personal decision, it turns out it does have an impact on other people – specifically how they view your relationship with your other half.
New research, published in the journal Sex Roles, found that a woman who keeps her maiden name is seen as having more authority in the relationship, and that it affects how people view her husband.
Men whose wives keep their surnames after marriage are often viewed as less masculine, according to the study conducted by researchers in the US and UK. Instead, they were thought to have more feminine traits such as being ‘submissive’, ‘caring’, ‘understanding’ and ‘timid’.
‘A woman’s marital surname choice therefore has implications for perceptions of her husband’s instrumentality, expressivity, and the distribution of power in the relationship,’ says Rachael Robnett, the study’s lead author, in a journal release.
‘Our findings indicate that people extrapolate from marital surname choices to make more general inferences about a couple’s gender-typed personality traits.’
Of course, this doesn’t mean women shouldn’t keep their maiden names if they want to, but shows just how far we have to go in changing old-fashioned attitudes towards women and relationships.
