South African Men Win Right To Take Wives’ Last Names 

South Africa’s Constitutional Court ruled that husbands are allowed to take the last names of their wives, overturning a law that prohibited them from doing so, which the court deemed to be gender-based discrimination, the BBC reported. 

According to South African law, women, but not men, have had the automatic right to change their last names after marriage, divorce or widowhood. Men, however, had to apply to the Director-General of Home Affairs for such a change. The court said this rule was unconstitutional, SABC News wrote.  

The case arose after plaintiff, Henry van der Merwe, was forbidden from taking the last name of his wife, Jana Jordaan, while another party to the case, Andreas Nicolas Bornman, was forbidden from hyphenating his surname to include Donnelly, the surname of his wife, Jess Donnelly-Bornman. 

The two couples filed legal action and won in the lower court but the decision needed confirmation by the country’s high court for the change to be able to take effect.  

The two couples argued that the law was outdated and patriarchal, saying it violated the equality clause enshrined in the constitution by generating unnecessary gender distinctions. They added that while the provision might originally have been designed to ease administrative procedures for women, it now served “to entrench stereotypical assumptions about the roles of men and women within a family structure.” 

Parliament will now need to amend the law for the change to become final.