My husband and mother-in-law both defended the practice, saying that that was the name she used when she was alive ...
DEAR MISS MANNERS: I was at an art show with my husband and mother-in-law that featured a 19th-century female artist. A brochure was given to us at entry that listed the artist’s name as “Mrs. John Smith,” with no first name given.
How should I have handled this -- should I have kept my mouth shut? Also, did the use of the artist’s husband’s name honor her, or should the writer have been more cognizant of today’s sensibilities? In the 19th century, the construction “Mrs. John Smith” was so conventional that few people thought of it as either insulting the wife or honoring the husband. One who did was the feminist and abolitionist Lucy Stone, who kept her birth name after her 1855 marriage. But the Lucy Stone League, created in Stone’s name to encourage other women to follow suit, was not founded until 1921, and the older convention generally persisted well into the 20th century.
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