Although by no means mandatory, it is common for Western women to take the husband's surname upon marriage. But they always keep their first name.

Do they? Not long ago in Macedonia it was de rigueur – and still happens, especially in the countryside – that a woman, upon marriage, loses not only her maiden surname, but also her first name. She simply becomes her husband's wife.

Thus, if a woman called Ivana marries a man whose first name is Petre, not only does she take his surname, but her first name becomes ‘Petrejca’. Similarly, Tome's wife becomes ‘Tomejca’; the bride of Atanas becomes ‘Atanasica’, and Stojan's wife will be known as ‘Stojanica’.

While the custom is slowly disappearing, it is still common not to know a married woman's ‘real’ first name, even if she is a neighbour or close acquaintance.

WESTERN VARIETIES

In Hungary, before 1950, a married woman commonly lost both her own first and last names entirely, and instead became called by her husband's first and last names, with a marker suffix meaning ‘wife of’. Nowadays, a Hungarian woman has many choices of combining her own names with her husband's in a variety of ways, as well as keeping her full name unchanged.

The old-fashioned English version of a married woman being referred to by her husband's name, ‘Mrs John Doe’, for instance, should in many people's opinion be marked as an archaism.

OTHER NAMELESSNESSES

In Qing Dynasty China (up until the early 1900s), if you were unfortunate enough to be born a female into a poor family, chances were that you wouldn't have a name at all: daughters were commonly called ‘number-one girl’, ‘number-two girl’ and so on.