From: utzoo!decvax!cca!ima!johnl
Newsgroups: net.singles
Title: Re: What"s in a name?
Article-I.D.: ima.252
Posted: Fri Nov 19 11:19:25 1982
Received: Sun Nov 21 01:56:07 1982
References: eisx.442

     Aren't lawyers great?  When I got married, also in new Jersey, we
asked our lawyer the same question, whether there was any rule about the
woman keeping or changing her name.  He looked it up and assured us that
there wasn't.  In case you're wondering, she kept her name.

     The conventional wisdom is that Hawaii is the only state where the
woman is required to take the man's name, and even they don't enforce it.
The common law says that you can use any name that you're generally known
by, and the name you grew up with would seem to fit that category.

     My sister-in-law actually changed her name and several years later
changed it back (being "Mrs. him" rather than "Dr. her" implied that her
Ph.D in developmental neurobiology was somehow less valid than his and we
all had graduated from 60's to 70's consciousness, but I digress.)  That
required getting some petition approved by a court since she hadn't used
her maiden name for a while.  The only problem was that many people
erroneously assumed that she'd gotten divorced.  The moral of the story
seems to be "make up your mind."

	John Levine
	ima!johnl, yale-co!jrl