The issue of women’s surnames after marriage is virtually absent from Polish academic research. This article attempts to analyse the phenomenon of women changing (or not changing) their surnames after marriage from an interdisciplinary perspective. Drawing on their own sociological research, the authors interpret the moment of surname change as an example of a rite of passage in accordance with Arnold van Gennep’s theory, understood as a symbolic crossing of a boundary (threshold). In the article, they reflect on a woman’s surname after marriage in the context of the power of tradition, transformations in social identity, and women’s perception of the boundaries of individuality.

Research into the clothing worn by rural inhabitants in various regions of Poland has long been an important branch of national ethnography. Over the years, interviews have been used to collect numerous statements about how people dressed and when. This information was often treated as an objective description of the past. This article aims to propose an alternative method of analysis based on tools developed by folklorists. It should be remembered that stories about the past are a communal good constructed in the present, and are therefore adapted to the context and current needs. When we examine only what clothing looked like in the past, such statements may seem useless or even misleading. However, they are valuable from the perspective of folkloristic narrative analysis, as they testify to how our interlocutors perceived the world and how they categorised the phenomena they encountered. The presented analysis is based on many years of field research in Wilamowice and on the border between Silesia and Lesser Poland.