Identity and names in 1970s: Women’s surname debates — Section 742: Women’s surname debates

Names sit at the seam of self and file — how people claim, refuse, hyphenate and translate the string others use to find them. Identity research treats a name as one membership badge among others: gender, citizenship, profession, fandom. The same person may hold a legal name, a family nickname, a baptismal name, a generation character and a username — each for a different audience.

This page maps that stack. It does not treat a name as the self, and it does not treat etymology as a personality test. It is a public instrument of identity, not the whole self. People survive name changes; files sometimes do not. A rejected name can reimpose a gender or a past the bearer has left. The harm is social recognition, not magic in the syllables.

Spanish-style two surnames usually encode two parental lines. Forms that drop one surname erase part of that map. What did the Emily/Lakisha study show about identity? It showed that others assign racialised identity from a name alone, then allocate opportunity. That is their inference, not the bearer’s essence.