I might lose my feminist cred with this one.

What's in a (sur)name? To first wavers, there is the burden of millenia of patriarchy. Their symbolic gesture of response was keeping their own. Translation: I am my own woman, marriage is not a transfer of me as a piece of property from my father to you. Later on, feminists took the whole "joined by the bonds of matrimony" literally and hyphenated, thereby afflicting legions of spawn with their unwieldy double names.

Well, Germany is fighting back. That's right, in the name of efficiency and compassion for poor unsuspecting offspring, Germany has made the use of hyphenated names illegal. From the Wall Street Journal,

why no hyphens? Dr. Eichhoff-Cyrus, who hyphenated her own surname after marriage but is not allowed to pass it on to her children, explains that the concern is hyphenation multiplication. If a double-named boy grew up to marry and have children with a double-named woman, those children could have four names, and their children could have eight, and their children could have 16. The bureaucracy shudders.

Wish you could read the whole thing, as it's purty funny. They actually have local registries (Standesamt) that have to approve your child's name. Mostly they check for gender indication. L & B, you'd be ok because you have a gender-specific first name.

I don't know about that part, but I support the antihyphenation clause. The kid used as an example in the article would have been Leonard Matthias Grunkin-Paul. Now that's just cruel. Certainly I am in favor of equality; moreover, naming is a personal matter in which the government really should not have much say. But single-word surnames seem a kind of public good.

So I guess I'm still on the fence as far as feminism's reconciliation with society is concerned. But what about me? What would I do for myself? Funny, the (two, count them, two) women economists in my section were discussing this with me a while back. First one's advice was to take his name if I married before I had published (professionally, in an academic journal), keep my own if I marry after. Simple enough, and I suppose professional recognition is its own kind of self-affirmation. Second's advice is slightly more complex. Those of you who know me know that I go by a dimunitive of my middle name. She said I should take the unabbreviated middle name as my first, maiden name as middle, and husband's name as last, a la HRC, except she's always been called Hillary. Any EconLit search for either maiden or new last name would produce all articles. But hey wait a second, I'm still essentially bowing to patriarchal tradition, and I kinda like the name I go by. I've never known any other, and my identity has been constructed on this name, complicated as it is. Her argument was that the nickname was juvenile, the middle name more professional. I still like it. Hmph. Got out of the conversation by telling her I wasn't even dating anyone. Decision delayed.