There are a number of partriarchal cultures in which women are viewed as property -- as most cultures do -- but in which wives do not change their names.
There are few commonalities among those that do or that don't. So the custom itself does not consistently MEAN anything.
One take on it could be that in cultures where women do change their names, they were more openly welcomed into their husband's kinship group. They were not simply a necessity of exogamy, strangers brought in and tolerated in order to produce the next generation.
I don't subscribe to this theory either. Similar behaviors mean very different things in different cultures.
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