Free Thinking Festival: The Essay
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 5 November 2014
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sophie Coulombeau on the origins of the custom for women to take their husband's name. Recorded in front of an audience at BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival of Ideas at Sage Gateshead. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the AHRC to find the brightest academic minds with the potential to turn their ideas into broadcasts.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.4 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music |
| 0:27.0 | when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:41.0 | My name is Sophie Colombo. |
| 0:47.5 | But a year from now, after the fuss from my wedding has died down, it could be something rather different. |
| 0:56.6 | For me, to change my surname to that of my partner, would profoundly affect my sense of identity. On the one hand, it might bind us into a family unit and make it easier to know what to write on the birth certificates |
| 1:01.9 | of any children. But on the other, it would make me first and foremost a wife, while my husband |
| 1:07.8 | would remain quite simply himself. |
| 1:16.2 | Introducing myself as Sophie Hardiman would mean that saying I do had fundamentally changed the answer to the question, who am I? |
| 1:21.0 | If I chose to take my husband's name, I'd be far from alone. |
| 1:25.5 | A Eurobarometer survey conducted in 1994 |
| 1:28.3 | suggested that 94% of British women |
| 1:31.7 | took their husband's names when they got married. |
| 1:34.7 | Recent smaller scale research, however, |
| 1:37.1 | suggests that this proportion has shrunk significantly |
| 1:39.7 | over the last two decades, |
| 1:42.1 | especially among highly educated and younger women. |
| 1:45.0 | In 2013, academic Dr Rachel Thwaites found that 75% of respondents took their husband's names. |
| 1:53.0 | And just last month, the Discourses of Marriage Research Group, |
| 1:57.0 | a multi-institutional network interested in marriage equality, found that only |
| 2:02.1 | 54% did so. Since in Britain, it has always been legal to call yourself whatever you like, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

