Facebook

I spent a bit of time the other day in Facebook. It's quite interesting who you can find through it; I say through Facebook, not necessarily on it. I came to a list of people who were at my secondary school in the same final year as me. I think I recognised the names of three men; no women at all. As we're all in our 50s they will probably be on their second or third change of surname (through marriage, of course).
Living in Spain that sounds wierd to me. Here, women keep the surnames they were born with.
Children take a surname from each parent, for example: the president of the government's father's first surname is Rodriguez, his mother's Zapatero, so he is José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. My children have my husband's surname and then mine; I only have my father's, so I've got a bad deal!
This lovely modern system where women don't lose their surnames started as a pretty unpleasant device to check racial purity in the bad old days of the Inquisition, so that you didn't marry a new Christian (converted Jew or Moslem) because you could tell by the surnames!
Anyway, that's why I'm still Sally Bracher.