Amy Erickson

Thomas Gainsborough
Mr and Mrs Andrews
about 1750. Courtesy The National Gallery.

The habit of women taking a husband’s surname is seen by some as reflecting ancient patriarchal control of women, and by others as a romantic custom symbolising unity. But there is nothing either ancient or romantic about it: the practice has a very specific history. 

Surnames were first used in elite noble families, and were applied to more ordinary people in England in the late 14th-century poll taxes. At the same time, English lawyers were developing the rule of ‘coverture’, whereby all of a woman’s assets (with certain limited exceptions) were acquired by her husband upon marriage.

This was distinct from the Roman law of marital property which gave a husband the management but not the ownership of his wife’s property. Variations of the Roman law prevailed throughout the rest of Europe, including Scotland.  

So for 500 years, England was the only European country in which husbands gained (almost) complete control of their wives’ assets, and where women exchanged their birth surnames for their husbands’ surnames when they married. In the image at the top of Mr and Mrs Andrews, the land depicted in the painting was hers, and it has become his with their marriage. 

While unique in Europe, the habit of taking a husband’s surname spread to North America and many other places through England’s extensive colonisation. By around 1900, thanks to the influence of the British Empire and its former colony, the United States, the practice became popular in other parts of Europe and was even made mandatory in a few places.

Mr Wife?

It was never mandatory in England for a woman to take her husband’s surname. There are historic cases of married women retaining their birth name as a professional name. Ann Fisher (1719-78), the daughter of a Northumberland yeoman, wrote books on education. She continued to publish as A. or Ann Fisher after her marriage (age 32) to the printer Thomas Slack (age 28), and throughout their personal and professional partnership of more than a quarter of a century in a Newcastle printing house. 

A new grammar, with exercises of bad English: or, an easy guide to speaking and writing the English language properly and correctly. By A. Fisher (1753).

There were even circumstances where a husband would take his wife’s surname, if her wealth was substantially larger than his. For example:

• Whenever an estate ‘failed’ in the male line by the circumstances of a landowner producing either no children or only daughters, a name change was likely to be imposed – either on a daughter’s husband or on a male heir who traced descent through the female line and so bore a different surname.
• Around 15 per cent of marriages produced no sons, and some owners never married to produce legitimate heirs, making surname change accompanying inheritance a relatively regular occurrence. When Anna Scott (1651-1732), sole heiress to the Earl of Buccleuch, married Charles II’s illegitimate son (the future Duke of Monmouth), her widowed mother ensured that he took the Scott surname. It is estimated that every aristocratic family in England has undergone descent through the female line via surname change.
• Landowners could make mandatory the adoption of an heiress’s surname by her husband through perfectly legal conditions placed on bequests. So Sussex grocer’s daughter Mary Ann Gilbert married Davies Giddy in 1808, shortly after she turned 32. Nine years and five children later, the Giddys became the Gilberts in order to inherit an estate of a thousand acres from Mary Ann’s childless paternal uncle.

Louis Gauffier, Portrait d’Elizabeth Holland avec son fils (1794).

• Any marriage between couples with significant assets involved a marriage settlement, or what would now be called a ‘prenup’. Again, these were perfectly legal ways to avoid the husband’s complete control over the wife’s assets: they established in advance of marriage the property that was to go to the future sons and daughters, and the amount that a wife should have in the event of the couple’s separation and upon her widowhood.
• Where the wife was heiress to a large fortune, a marriage settlement could require the husband to adopt her name. In the Sussex baronet Webster family, the heavily indebted fourth baronet married the heiress Elizabeth Vassall in 1786 and adopted her surname in order to receive her inheritance of rich holdings in New England and Jamaica. One plantation alone brought the former Webster, now Vassall, an income of over £7,000 a year. 

Coverture

Even among marrying couples with only small amounts of property, a bride might perceive a need to protect hers legally from coverture. In 1624, Katherine Trusse, the widow of a Lincolnshire ferryman, drew up a bond to ensure that her intended second husband should pay for her four children’s upbringing and each of their £5 portions from their father, with interest. But this type of marriage settlement did not involve a name change for the husband. 

The difference between a husband’s management of his wife’s property in continental Europe and ownership in England had ramifications for marriage beyond the change of surname.

Coverture made divorce impossible because a wife could not extract her assets from the marital household. Separation could be upheld by the English courts, which could order a husband to pay his wife a maintenance (alimony) to live on, where a couple was wealthy enough to afford such an arrangement. But no remarriage was possible. Divorce was possible in Catholic France but not in Protestant England because a French woman’s assets could be extricated from her husband’s.  

Other surname practices and the English addition of a husband’s first name 

Of course the birth surname is itself a patriarchal construct, reflecting paternal ownership. Some cultures give children both the maternal and the paternal surnames conjoined, as in Spain. But these maternal names drop out over time, as that child’s children take the paternal half of each parent’s name.  

The Nordic countries used a patronymic naming system until around 1900, in which each generation’s surname changed with the given name of the father: the children of Eric Jonsson and Maria Andersson (remembering that Nordic married women did not take their husbands’ names) would be surnamed Ericsson and Ericsdotter. In Iceland, this system is still used, but the surname may be matronymic as well as patronymic. 

Sir John Everett Millais, Bt, Mrs James Wyatt Jr and her Daughter Sarah. c.1850. Copyright Tate CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0

In England, the adoption of a husband’s first name as well as his surname, as in Millais’s portrait of ‘Mrs James Wyatt’, began to appear only around 1800. Wherever this phrasing is applied to a woman’s portrait before that time, it has been retrospectively given a title in the 19th or 20th century. So title of the portrait christened ‘Mrs Thomas Talbot’ (1638-1706) would have been unrecognizable to its sitter. In the 17th century, Ann Yate would have been ‘Miss Yate’ or ‘Miss Ann Yate’ as a teenager, ‘Mrs  Yate’ until her marriage, and ‘Mrs Ann Talbot’ after her marriage to Thomas Talbot. 

Pieter Borsseler, Anne Yate (1638-1706), Mrs Thomas Talbot; Copyright National Trust Images.

Further reading

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entries for Anna Scott, Duchess of Buccleugh, Webster Family, Mary Ann Gilbert, and Ann Fisher.

A. L. Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993).

A.L. Erickson, ‘The marital economy in comparative perspective’, in The Marital Economy in Scandinavia and Britain 1400-1900, ed. Maria Ågren and A. L. Erickson (Ashgate, 2005).