Look at this piece of info and read it well.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has dropped the use of her maiden name "Rodham" in her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Clinton identifies herself as "Hillary Clinton" in her campaign press releases and on her campaign website. The lone mention of her maiden name is in a campaign biography that says "Hillary's father, Hugh Rodham, was the son of a factory worker from Scranton."
She continues to use "Hillary Rodham Clinton" in her New York-focused press releases and in the Senate.
Clinton appeared surprised last week when asked why her presidential campaign had dropped her maiden name. Clinton laughed, shook her head and replied: "I haven't, I haven't," before dashing off.
Howard Wolfson, a top communications adviser to Clinton, downplayed any significance to the change. Asked if it was a strategic decision to drop "Rodham," Wolfson replied: "That's a fair question, but there's no plan behind it."
The second-term senator and former first lady has emphasised various names in Arkansas and Washington, DC, over the past 25 years.
Laurie Scheuble, a sociologist at Pennsylvania State University who has studied the choice of last names by married women, says Clinton's decision to drop her maiden name puts her in sync with the vast majority of married women in America.
"To most people, family means everyone having the same last name," says Scheuble, author of "Trends in Women's Marital Name Choice: 1966-1996" and "Attitudes Toward Nontraditional Marital Name Choices." "She's doing the right thing politically to appeal to the most voters. She's conforming to the social norm."
Married working women often face a dilemma over whether to retain their maiden name alone, use both their maiden name and their husband's last name or use their husband's last name alone.
Clinton and seven other married women in the Senate have adopted the names of a husband. Only Clinton and Sen Kay Bailey Hutchison have used their maiden names in conjunction with their husbands' last names.
Scheuble says her research shows that 95 percent of married women use a husband's last name. Of those, about 25 percent informally use their maiden name as a middle name.
About 4 percent retain their maiden name as their last name.
And about one percent legally change their last names to hyphenated names that include both their maiden name and a husband's last name.
Hillary Rodham married Bill Clinton, her Yale Law School classmate, in 1975 in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
She continued to identify herself as "Hillary Rodham" in her private legal career at the prestigious Rose law firm in Little Rock as Bill Clinton won statewide election as attorney general in 1976 and as governor in 1978.
But in 1980, Bill Clinton narrowly lost his bid for re-election as governor, in part because Republican challenger Frank White made an issue out of Hillary Rodham's professional independence in the socially conservative state. White repeatedly emphasised to voters that his wife was known as "Mrs. Frank White."
After Bill Clinton lost his bid for a second term as governor, the politically ambitious couple regrouped for a political comeback. Hillary Rodham began to identify herself as "Hillary Clinton" amid statewide polls that showed her reliance on her maiden name had cost her husband as much as six percentage points among voters.
Bill Clinton won a second term as governor in 1982; Hillary Clinton used that name for the remainder of her husband's gubernatorial campaigns and during his 1992 presidential campaign.
When the Clintons moved into the White House in 1993 and the couple mapped an independent policy role on health care for Hillary Clinton, she began to use "Hillary Rodham Clinton" - a moniker that she retained through eight years as first lady and in her two Senate campaigns in 2000 and 2006.
Shortly after the Clintons moved into the White House in January 1993, the Gallup Poll asked 1,001 Americans in a telephone survey to gauge Clinton's decision to have people call her "Hillary Rodham Clinton" instead of "Hillary Clinton."
The survey found 9 percent thought the name change was a good idea, 21 percent thought it was a bad idea and 69 percent said it "doesn't matter much."
NY Times