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About this quote

What does it mean?
Stone asserts that taking a husband's name erases a wife's identity. She champions name retention as a right for both spouses.
In plain terms
Women should keep their own names just like men do. Your name is part of who you are.
What can you take from it?
Keep your name to maintain your identity.

Where it applies

  • marriage decisions
  • legal documentation
  • family planning

Putting it to work

  • keep maiden name
  • use hyphenated name
  • refuse legal change

Questions to consider

  • What does your name say about you?
  • Why do we change names at marriage?

Another view

Legal and social systems still make keeping your name difficult.

More from Lucy Stone

  1. By what toil and fatigue and patience and strife and the beautiful law of growth has all this been wrought? These things have not come of themselves. They coul…

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  2. But I do believe that a woman's truest place is in a home, with a husband and with children, and with large freedom, pecuniary freedom, personal freedom, and t…

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  3. While the law dealt thus with her in regard to her property, it dealt still more hardly with her in regard to her children. No married mother could have any ri…

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