Women believe that their names are personal, not political—in large part because the decision-making around them remains so culturally restricted and curtailed. A woman keeping her name is making a choice that is expected to be limited and futile. She will not pass the name down to her children, or bestow it upon her husband. At most—or so people tend to think—her last name will be crammed into the middle of her children’s names, or packed around a hyphen, and then later dropped for space reasons. (And in fact, a Louisiana law still requires the child of a married couple to bear the husband’s
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