Women and their married names

Okay. I am a person that is really big on self identity and nothing seems to pain me more than reading an obituary or a death certificate and seeing as woman listed as Mrs. So and So. I understand the act of taking your husband's last name and all that jazz. ( I wouldn't do it if I were a woman but that's just me).

What irks me is I found a death certificate of an ancestor as Mrs. J Parrish. The obituary was the same way and in the obituary her daughters were listed as Mrs (their husbands names). I no longer have a connection to this family so I have no idea what her daughters names were to begin with. I have tried looking in marriage records for the men to see if I could come across them and the Parrish women they married and have hit a dead end.

Why couldn't the people placing the death certificate and obituary just give the woman her name. What did they do? Go around calling her Mrs So and So all day, everyday. Did no one ever hear her given name?

Maybe I just dont understand the need to only be known by a husband's name.

(This passion for genealogy has continued. I had forgotten how to log into this page for many years and just found an old notebook that gave me what I needed to be able to log back in. So I am updating all these pages and will start posting new blogs shortly. )