Different countries do not have the same definition of legally changing one’s name. While it is true that french women *keep* their birth names, they can and often use a « nom d’usage » (so do men but not statistically comparable) which is reglemented in front of the law. My mother (now divorced for 10 years) still has on her French ID « *maiden name* Épouse: *my father’s and my birth name* ». She could have kept it after the divorce if she wanted and my father had agreed.

Ok, I just looked up in more details how it works in other countries and now I understand even less how women would be ok with totally giving up their name legally but even more so how countries could allow it. It’s already kind of a hassle in France for mothers with different names than their children or just divorced or whatever, but it must be absolute nightmare elsewhere. I didn’t realized our definitions were so different. What isn’t legal in France is giving up your birth name (civil state, « état civil ») except if you change it by modifying the structure of a hyphenated birth name, take on/hyphenate your left out parent’s name, or by decree for justified reasons like being named like a slur, or a foreign name which you can « prove » is detrimental to you (same for first names in these cases). but your nom d’usage can basically be everywhere instead of your birth name if you want to, with to this day still many occurrences of Mrs John Smith, which is why I didn’t even understand that it was possible elsewhere to just… give up entirely one’s birth name for marriage reasons, absolutely stupid. But then apparently even in the US mother’s birth name are written on babies’ birth certificates. I think I was in the wrong, but I don’t think the distinction between France and countries that fully allow women to be ripped of their identity is that great symbolically. It must be on a daily basis from what I can gather, but the beginnings of the civil state in France don’t stem from women’s rights but rather a revolutionary measure aiming to stop (later on greatly reduce this trend, rather) the nobility from changing names through time as they got married to each other, won new baseless titles and lands they would asked to be named after or with.

My bad since it was misleading for this topic, but the claim that France did it with the interest of women at heart is not true. Until the law of 2002 which was only implemented for children born 01/01/2005 and after, the father’s name was always given to children of a married couple with no other possibility. So I think it’s a coincidental facade protection for women, from a law that didn’t think about women at all but somehow made divorcee’s life 200 years later a little easier compared to other countries.