Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

It took until the 1975 Tennessee State Supreme Court case Dunn v. Palermo for the final law to this effect to be struck down. “Married women,” wrote Justice Joe Henry, “have labored under a form of societal compulsion and economic coercion which has not been conducive to the assertion of some rights and privileges of citizenship.” A requirement that a woman take her husband’s name “would stifle and chill virtually all progress in the rapidly expanding field of human liberties. We live in a new day. We cannot create and continue conditions and then defend their existence by reliance on the custom thus created.” Women began keeping their names in the seventies, when it became broadly possible to do so. In 1986, The New York Times began using the honorific “Ms.” to refer to women whose marital status was unknown, as well as to married women who wished to use their birth names.