Female Supremacy Articles - Page 20

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Some, it turns out, do it to preserve their wife's rare last name. Others to wipe the slate clean and start a new life, turning marriage into something akin to the French Foreign Legion. Some guys do it just to be different.

Bobbie Jeanne, whose last name is linked to a Sicilian castle, and who is one of a few dozen people with her last name left in the United States, didn't want to trade in her unusual last name for the most usual – Smith.

So Dayton, of Huntington Beach, checked with his father, who was raised in an orphanage, about whether it was OK for him to become a La Grua. His father, unsure at the time if Smith was his given last name, didn't mind.

Dayton says no one blinked an eye 31 years ago when he decided to take his wife's last name. Though he did have to swear before a Superior Court judge that he wasn't changing his name to escape the law.

While some women don't mind adding a hyphen, or even combining their name with that of their husband to create a whole new last name, that wasn't an option for Jill Dominguez when she got engaged to Richard Vais 12 years ago.

Jill, president of a community investment corporation, was raised by a feminist mother and grew up reading Ms. magazine. Through her Women's Studies courses in college she learned that for centuries, women were obligated to give up their last names when they married. Under the law, women actually became the property of the men they wed, thus assuming one identity.