I have debated with myself how much effort to put into researching the female Hoodlesses for this study. The majority of them marry, take on a new surname and all their offspring are then born with a name that is not Hoodless. Are their descendants relevant to this study?
The protocol for a One Name Study states that you are documenting evidence of all occurrences of the name, not the descendants of someone who had the name originally, because that is just a regular ancestral tree study. My issue with this approach is that a One Name Study essentially then becomes a patriarchal study, a homage to male dominance and continues to support the imbalance of power that men and male influence had on society for a number of centuries. In the past where we source our information and gather the stories of these women’s lives, married women changed their name to their husband’s surname, bowing to the social convention that treated them as much like property as houses, land, livestock and other chattels were treated. Married women were not independent entities in their own right for many centuries, their limited rights were directly under the control of men; initially their fathers or other male guardians and eventually their husbands. They could not vote until 1918 in the UK, they could not inherit property in the US and UK until 1922.
I do not want my One Name Study to dismiss the Hoodless women just because they married and changed their name. Likewise, I do not want to be restricted to only promoting and documenting the women who were not Hoodless born but married into the surname. I will do so, of course. But I will not ignore those with Hoodless DNA. I have carefully considered this because it determines which path my research efforts follow and there will probably be those who say I am not being true to the ONS tradition. This is my choice. It is my plan to treat any females born with the Hoodless name as equals to their male relatives.