Awesome post Lebowski!!
Seriously, this thread is quasi-pointless. Yes, all of you SDN users are coming on here arguing that women shouldn't let their husbands own them by changing their name, blah blah blah.
We get it, seriously. SDN is NOT a representative sample.
"According to a recent study by Harvard economics professor Claudia Goldin, based on Massachusetts birth records, the number of college-educated women in their 30s keeping their name has dropped from 23 percent in 1990 to 17 percent in 2000." This is from a piece in this article,
http://www.slate.com/id/2097231/ (Every other resource I found had it right around this same percentage, + or - 3%)
Personally I don't really agree with this author's reasons, but I do agree with her conclusions. She seems to suggest perhaps you should change your name, and she gives reasons, but they are all practical reasons as opposed to what we have been dicussing here, ie commitment, etc.
The point is, that according to this study, of women who get married in their 30's, those who are most likely to keep their maiden name because they've used it for so long, only 17 percent keep it right now... Hmmm, 17 percent choose to break tradition and keep it, while 83% choose to take their husbands name. If you went based on this thread, you'd think 95% of all women feel they are violated by their husbands name.
Obviously, no consensus will every be reached here because again, these are SDN users. The type of people that SDN attracts are the type of people who score 35 on the MCAT, have a 4.0, lean liberal, type A, extremely firm beliefs, and obviously mostly believe a women should keep her Dad's name. (As a huge argument for not name changing is the ownership issue, I don't really see how the Father has more "ownership" than the husband, but whatever floats your boat.) (BTW- I don't view the name as ownership, but was merely drawing an argument for the few posters that have said this, I know not all of you invoked the ownership argument, so no need to harp on it.)
Again, we get it, women's power. 17% of women in the real world feel this way, while 83% don't have a problem with taking their husbands name. SDN represents a MINORITY. So, don't take the percentages of opinions displayed here as representative.
EDIT: To add, I thought the article above made an interesting argument for those people who decide to combine last names and how it negates the "purpose" of a surname. I hadn't really thought about that, but it makes sense... I also thought her argument about where women who don't take their husbands last name fit into the family tree. Seems like things could get confusing really fast...