In other cases, courts granted a man's request to force his ex-wife to refrain from using her married name after divorce. But the law has come around in the last twenty-five years. The 1971 Supreme Court decision upholding the Alabama statute would almost certainly be decided differently today, to require that states allow women to retain their own birth names before, during, and after marriage. Moreover, in the early 1980s, women began to prevail in lawsuits demanding the right to keep their own birth names during marriage, or to return to them after divorce. And when she divorces, she has the right to take her own name back or assume any other name.
Some legal hurdles do still exist.
The Persistence of Name-Changing Despite Legal Victories Despite a century and a half of clamoring for legal change that was ultimately successful, the tradition of married women adopting their husbands' names persists. According to a recent survey, more than ninety percent of American women use their husbands' names exclusively. And almost no married women, even those that keep their own surname, give it to their children. And generally, few divorced women seek to give children their own birth names, even those who are raising their children as a single parent without the father's involvement. The answer is that cultural expectations are now the obstacle the law once was.