When you introduce yourself, you're not just sharing a label—you're carrying centuries of conquest, patriarchy, and cultural erasure on your tongue. The name on your driver's license contains hidden histories of who got to decide, who got erased, and who still holds power.

The Myth of Ancient Tradition

Most people assume surnames have existed forever, like thumbs or language. They haven't. Surnames are a relatively recent human invention, despite every culture having first names for millennia.

When William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066, he brought surnames along with violence. The Normans needed to track property and taxes. Names became tools of administration, ways to catalog the conquered. But even then, these labels remained fluid and inconsistent until the 17th century.

Before that flexibility hardened into law, English women had their own surnames. These names reflected their trades, characteristics, or family connections. Women kept their names after marriage. They passed them to children. Sometimes husbands even took their wives' surnames when it meant inheriting property or climbing socially.

Then coverture laws arrived in the 18th century, and everything changed. These legal principles prevented women from owning property. Only the husband's surname could become the family name. The earlier tradition—where women had naming autonomy—was erased so thoroughly that most people today believe women always took men's names.

Historian Deborah Anthony put it bluntly in 2018: "The history of women's surnames was entirely discarded and replaced with an alternate false tradition in the service of cultural and political ends."

When Marriage Erases Identity

The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote that in marriage, a woman "takes his name…she becomes his other 'half.'" Half. Not whole. Not herself.

Today, almost 90% of British women take their husband's names. Many believe it's legally required. Others see it as proof of commitment, a marker of the "good family." The social pressure operates so invisibly that questioning it feels radical.

The practice crosses cultures with different flavors of the same patriarchy. Japan's Meiji Civil Code, revised as recently as 1989, stipulated wives would take husbands' surnames. Ironically, aristocratic Japanese wives once kept their own names—but only because they were considered permanent outsiders, assigned lower status in their husbands' families.

France made a small correction in 2012 by removing "Mademoiselle" from official documents. Unlike men, who are always "Monsieur" regardless of marital status, women had been forced to advertise their availability through titles. The reform acknowledged what should have been obvious: a woman's relationship to marriage shouldn't define her official identity.

The comparison to enslaved African Americans keeps surfacing in academic literature, and it should make us uncomfortable. Enslaved people's names changed with each successive owner. The parallel isn't perfect, but it points to the same mechanism: those with power rename those without it.

Hatred Inscribed Upon the Land

If personal names reveal intimate power dynamics, place names broadcast conquest across entire landscapes. The United States contains at least 1,400 locations with official names containing racial slurs. More than 800 of these include the word "squaw," a term used to demean Indigenous women.

In November 2021, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland—herself a member of the Laguna Pueblo—announced a formal process to review and replace these derogatory names. "Racist terms have no place in our vernacular or on our federal lands," she said. "Our nation's lands and waters should be places to celebrate the outdoors and our shared cultural heritage—not to perpetuate the legacies of oppression."

But offensive slurs are only the most obvious problem. The entire American map is layered with European nostalgia and Christian devotion: New York, New England, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento. These names paved over Indigenous languages that had named these places for thousands of years.

Some Indigenous names survived—Massachusetts, Minnesota, Chicago, Utah, Mississippi, Oklahoma. Most Americans speak these words daily without recognizing their origins or meanings. The names remain, but the context and respect were stripped away.

Monuments to Genocide

Colorado's Kit Carson Peak honored an army officer who in 1864 forced 11,000 Navajos to Bosque Redondo internment camp. More than 2,000 died during what's now called the Navajo Long Walk. Mt. Evans celebrated John Evans, territorial governor during the Sand Creek Massacre, where white soldiers killed 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho people, mostly women and children.

Theodore Roosevelt, whose face is carved into Mount Rushmore, said in 1886: "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are." Mountains, parks, and schools across America bear his name.

These aren't neutral historical markers. They're choices about whose violence gets honored and whose suffering gets forgotten. As one scholar put it, colonial place-names are "hatred inscribed upon the land."

The good news is that change happens. Harney Peak in South Dakota became Black Elk Peak in 2016. Mt. McKinley returned to its Koyukon Athabascan name, Denali, in 2015. Each renaming acknowledges that the power to name a place has always been a form of power itself.

The Colonial Classroom and Office

Power structures don't only live in history books and on maps. They operate in everyday introductions and roll calls.

In Australia, many international students from Southeast Asia introduce themselves with English names instead of their birth names. Migrants report being asked for "easier" nicknames. Some employers simply assign English names to workers whose actual names they find inconvenient.

Scholar Tahmina Rashid connects these dots: "Naming practices are reflective of prevailing power structures and hierarchies; creating new identities by erasing previous identities; creating new relationships and histories by maintaining colonial patriarchies."

When a teacher can't be bothered to learn a student's actual name, that's not just rudeness. It's a continuation of colonial logic that says Western norms matter and other cultures should adapt. The renamed person carries a double burden: losing their identity while making the dominant culture more comfortable.

This pattern appears in development studies, international business, and global education. Naming systems influence what gets valued, whose knowledge counts, and which traditions deserve preserving. Western naming practices assert superiority and enable Western prominence in global knowledge production.

What's in Your Name?

Hillary Clinton's surname became a political flashpoint multiple times in her career. Whether she used "Clinton" or "Rodham" or both, people read meaning into her choice. The fact that her name was a choice—while her husband's never was—reveals the double standard perfectly.

Courts in the United States have repeatedly upheld discriminatory naming practices, sometimes creating what scholars call "double-erasure" of married women's identities. Legal decisions minimize women's heritage while favoring men's rights, all while pretending to honor tradition. But as we've seen, that tradition is largely fabricated.

The systems feel natural because they're familiar. We inherit them like eye color, never thinking to question why they work this way. But surnames aren't genetic. They're political.

Breaking the Pattern

Understanding naming conventions as power structures doesn't require abandoning your name or judging anyone's choices. It requires seeing the choices clearly.

When a woman decides whether to change her name at marriage, she should know she's not following ancient tradition. She's navigating a system designed in the 18th century to erase her legal existence.

When Americans drive past Mt. Evans, they should know they're looking at a monument to massacre. When Australians ask immigrants for "easier" names, they should recognize they're asking people to erase themselves for convenience.

Four centuries of colonialism are mapped onto lands that had Indigenous names for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Those names contained knowledge about places, stories, and relationships that surnames and conquest tried to overwrite.

Names matter because they're how we claim space in the world. They're how we're remembered. They're how we connect to ancestors and pass something forward to descendants. The question isn't whether naming reveals power structures. The question is whether we'll keep pretending it doesn't.

Every introduction carries history. Every signature continues or challenges a legacy. Your name isn't just yours—it's a document of who had power when it was written.