I should have given my children my surname

[Loki]

I should have given my children my surname

I kept my last name yet, like the vast majority of women, let my kids take my husband's name. This should be a feminist issue



Lauren Apfel
theguardian.com, Tuesday 15 October 2013 16.30 BST


'According to one survey, only 4% of children have their mother’s last name, when that name is different from their father’s.'



My children's last name is the same as their father's, but only because the first one was male. That was the deal my husband and I struck in the interest of fairness. If it was a boy: Tomkins. A girl: Apfel. I wanted a boy and he preferred a girl, so we offered each other the gift of lineage as compensation for the reality of mild gender disappointment. For practicality's sake, we decided that baby number one would be determinative and all subsequent kids would bear its surname, whatever that turned out to be.

I never, not for a second, considered taking my husband's last name myself. This puts me in a minority: the percentage of women who keep their name these days hovers around 18%. What puts me in an even smaller minority, however, is that I never assumed our children would take it either. Not by right, at least. According to one survey, only 4% of children have their mother's last name, when that name is different from their father's. This is a staggering statistic when viewed in the context of the strides feminism has made in other arenas.

Hanna Rosin has written recently, and with much fanfare, that the "patriarchy is dead". While there are many holes to pick in this statement, one of the more fundamental is to do with the etymology of the word itself. "Patriarchy" means, quite literally, "the rule of the father" and it refers to the ancient tendency to establish lineage through the male side of the family. The fact that the vast majority of children in 2013 don't have the last name their mothers were born with is proof that the concept of patriarchy is alive and kicking in at least one domain.

It could be argued that last names are not as symbolic of a woman's place in the world as they once were. Our generation, after all, is the flag-bearer of a "kinder, gentler, and more traditionally minded" post-feminism, as Judith Warner has insightfully put it. We aren't fighting the same fights our mothers did or, at any rate, we aren't fighting them so hard. Rafts of otherwise "modern" women will tell you until the cows come home that keeping their identity, in the form of the name they held before marriage, is simply not important to them. By extension, they will tell you that passing that name on to their children is not important either.

But this argument falls flat for the 18% (or more) of women who have chosen to keep their surname on principle. For us, it is as if feminism can stretch only so far before it snaps. And what is worse is that we offer the same grab bag of excuses our maiden name-bearing counterparts did to justify their initial decision: my husband cared more than I did, his mother and/or father would be devastated, his name is prettier than mine, it was the "right" (read: traditional) thing to do. When a woman retains her last name but then fails to give it to her kids, there is always some story rehearsed, about a bargain made or a concession granted. There is always a story that involves anything other than admitting how, in the end, we also fell victim to the power of precedence.

Because precedence is, of course, powerful. And there is a compelling historical reason why a child should take his father's last name: to prove the father's identity as such. As the Jewish practice of matrilineal descent makes clear, the only way to assure a bloodline prior to the advent of DNA testing is through the mother. We bear the baby, we bond with it for nine long months before it is severed from our body, and then Dad has to take our word for it that it is his. All he has is this word on which to ground his support and protection (and maybe the baby will look like him a little too). From an evolutionary perspective, patrilineal inheritance makes good sense.

And yet, the whole point of feminism is to overturn the stones of history, the ones that aren't fair and the ones that aren't relevant any more. This is precisely my regret with my own children's last name. It is that I let the claims of fairness in one particular house – our gender flip-of-the-coin – override the larger cultural significance of reversing a long-term pattern of inequality.

[Prisoner Of Ice]

Stuff like this really makes me laugh. Why bother? Her granddaughter will be in a burka.

[Bobby Martnen]

If any woman doesn't want to take my last name, she'll never be a wife of mine

[CertifiedCracker]

Hmmmm, well, it was common practice for families with no sons to double barrel their surname for inheritance reasons.

[Bobby Martnen]

Feminists are just getting out of hand. When they wanted to vote, that was fine, and women should be able to vote so that was good.

But now all they want is to throw out anything in society that is even remotely beneficial to men. Men getting custody of children? They don't like it. Men getting to have their own organizations (Boy Scouts)? They don't like it. Men getting to pass on their surname like their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers before them? They don't like it.

Is there any thing that is good for men that they do like?