Credit: Nick Romanenko

Rachelle Germana has interviewed 30 people with hyphenated surnames and found them to be "really passionate" about the topic. Her doctoral thesis examines the use of hyphenation.

When Permelia Toney married Philip Boss in 1972, she did the conventional thing and changed her name to Permelia Boss. When one of her bosses refused to call her “Mrs. Boss,” she changed her name to Permelia Toney-Boss.

End of problem, she thought.

But the problems were just beginning. At work, people stared at the hyphenated name on her name plate and weren’t at all sure what to call her. At the pediatrician, nurses assumed her children, whose last name was Boss, were also Toney-Bosses. Her credit card company refused to recognize the hyphen altogether. And so on.

“I thought a hyphenated last name would be perfectly clear, but a lot of people don’t understand what the hyphen means,” said Toney, a unit coordinator of operations and maintenance at Rutgers–Newark.

Carol Kaufman-Scarborough, a professor of marketing and associate dean of undergraduate studies in Camden, adopted a hyphenated name for entirely different reason. When she started publishing in the early 1980s, she entered the academic literature as “Carol Felker Kaufman”; Felker was her maiden name, and Kaufman her husband’s name. Then came a divorce and, in 1997, a second marriage. She adopted the name, “Carol Kaufman-Scarborough,” for the sake of professional continuity.

“With electronic searches, it’s so important to be able to find people’s work. I held on to my first husband’s name so people tracing my work would see the earlier work,” said Kaufman-Scarborough, who tells her students to call her simply “Dr. KS.”

“Names can become a complicated intersection of the world of work, and the personal,” she said.

Hyphens may be tiny punctuation marks, but they loom large when it comes to constructing social identity, says Rachelle Germana, a graduate student and instructor in the Department of Sociology who is writing her doctoral thesis on hyphenation as a cultural practice.

They also used a hyphen to create a kind of continuity between their past and their present selves – Rachelle Germana

Part of her research examines the use of hyphens in naming. For this Germana conducted a qualitative study of hyphenated surnames, conducted mainly within the Rutgers community. To gather data she advertised widely – on the university Human Resources Weekly Digest, through Craigslist, and with flyers – for human subjects with hyphenated last names willing to be interviewed for an hour. She did not offer pay but got an overwhelming initial response.

“People were really passionate about this topic,” said Germana, who presented her findings thus far at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociology Society March 22 in Baltimore. (She has interviewed 30 individuals but is looking for 10 more.)

Germana asked participants if they considered names important. All responded strongly that they were but had trouble explaining why, she said.

“I’d ask, ‘Why are they important?’ and they’d say, ‘Because they are,’ ” Germana said.

Twenty-six of her subjects were female and four were male, ranging in age from 19 to 65. Twenty-seven of the 30 adopted a hyphenated name, typically after much thought and consultation with others; three were given a hyphenated name at birth by their parents. Half said they did not always use their hyphenated name when they were not in informal situations, such as making an appointment for a haircut or a dinner reservation. And not everyone kept their new hyphenated name permanently; two legally dropped their hyphenated names after divorcing.

Research into hyphenated surnames within the United States has tended to focus on married women. A 1994 article in American Demographics magazine, still cited in current research, reported on the results of a poll showing that about 10 percent of married women used a surname that was different from their husband’s.

Germana’s study also involved many married women and confirmed earlier findings showing that women with hyphenated names hold a less traditional view of gender roles within marriage than women who drop their maiden names and take husbands’ names.

But she also found that marriage is only one life event that causes an individual to embrace a hyphenated name. Birth, adoption, divorce, death, and other life transitions also figure in the equation. One man, for example, added his mother’s birth name when his parents separated in order to “feel more connected” to his mother and his mother’s family. Another adopted a hyphenated name after coming out as gay. A female subject said she adopted a hyphenated name after an uncle, the last male on her mother’s side of the family, died. Another kept her birth name after she married, but added a hyphen and her husband’s name after they had a child.

Yet life changes are not the only trigger, Germana found. Sometimes the decision is made for purely practical reasons.

“They also used a hyphen to create a kind of continuity between their past and their present selves,” she said. “It’s a kind of management identity.”

In the course of her research Germana found some things that surprised her.

Feminism, for example, came up only “peripherally” during her conversations with women, rather than the explicit reason for their choice. Also, although most of the female subjects made nonconventional choices for themselves, they tended to maintain conventional naming practices for their children.

“Most felt strongly that children should have the father’s surname,” she said.

Germana also discovered that her interview subjects had many difficulties with institutional systems, mail, doctor’s offices, some credit cards, and standardized forms. Sometimes the forms did not have enough spaces for their names or did not allow the hyphen as a character. They also reported that their names seemed to agitate or confuse many people.

In October, Germana, 29, plans to marry. People who are familiar with her research frequently ask what she plans to do about her name.

It won’t change.

“I don’t ever think it ever occurred to me, even as a child, that I would have another name. I’m a gender scholar and a self-identified feminist, and it didn’t feel right to me,” she said. “Naming is still, I think, very much a political issue.”