Did your mother keep or change her name when she got married?

[DC Al Fine]

They are not married and, thankfully, that's not possible anymore to change names after marriage in Quebec since 1999.

How did they stop that?

It's in fact in 1981, not 1999.
It was during a reform of family law, which gave married women the right to own property(!), among other things. Before the reform, you were taking automatically the name of your husband unless you filled special forms (let's note than in Canada, provinces take care of vital records, including names). They removed that during the reform because they thought it was violating gender equality and violating the principe than names shouldn't change without a good reason, to simplify things for everyone. It wasn't retroactive, through. Some women still decided to do so after that, but it wasn't recognized by any administration and you couldn't get any service under that name. It's pretty much dead, now.

Did the Anglos put up a fuss? Around here not changing your name is seen as a "French thing" to do.

[DC Al Fine]

Why is the trend these days to take the husband's name? I cringe every time someone on my Facebook's feed has all of a sudden changed their last name. And if I were to ever bitch and moan about it, they would probably say it was their choice blah blah blah. Very well then, but the tradition is directly descended from when women were the property of men. Who wants to be associated with that tradition? Well, most women these days, inadvertently.

Classic Atlas fallacy. People don't think about the historical context behind these things.

As for the trend towards changing names, I'll offer a couple hypotheses.

1) Marriage rates are declining. The people getting married in 2014 are somewhat more conservative in aggregate than the people getting married in 1985.

2) There's a negative stereotype of women who hyphenate their names, and people don't want to be associated with that.