Give Your Kids Their Mother's Last Name

Patrilineal naming conventions have dominated the US for generations. It's time for a change.

Photo by Nappy on Unsplash

In the United States today, one of the most unusual and counterculture things you can do is give your child its mother’s last name.

It’s almost 2024. Women are in the workforce at the highest rates ever. A record number of women are having children without being married to men. We have self-driving cars! But still: Patrilineal, and deeply patriarchal, naming practices persist.

It remains unusual for women to even keep their names when they marry: Four in five women drop their own names when they get married, and replace it with their husband’s. Far, far fewer men take their wife’s name: Just 5 percent replace his name with hers, and just 1 percent hyphenate. And this is interesting: while nearly 80% of women take their husband’s name when they marry, only 33% of unmarried women say they plan to take their spouse’s name. About a quarter each want to keep their own or aren’t sure.

This is a curious gap. Perhaps unmarried women are more likely to be the kind of liberal, educated, feminist-minded women who are the most likely to keep their names — that makes sense, as those women also tend to marry later in life than women who are more conservative. But I suspect something also has to do with men: That a lot of men want their wives to take their names, and a lot of women either don’t want the fight or talk themselves into it — I don’t really care and he does; he has a better name; it’s tradition; my name is my dad’s anyway.

For children, this dynamic is magnified. A man who is fine with his wife keeping her name and identity in marriage might feel very different about children. Passing on a name from father to son is deeply-held cultural norm in the United States, an extension of the idea of a man as the head of his household and everyone in it his property, charges, and potential heirs. Some number of more-progressive men may be ok with sharing head-of-household duties with a woman, and having her keep her name. But giving her the naming authority of children? It’s ok if she’s the odd one out, with her own last name. It’s not ok if he is.

Despite running in very feminist circles, I know very, very few children who have only their mother’s last name. I know plenty who are double-barreled, some who are invented, and some who have mom’s name as a middle name. But matrilineal naming conventions does truly seem to be something that most men, even those married to feminist women, won’t readily do — and that most women also don’t choose.

Part of this is just tradition: When things are done a certain way for a long time, most people continue to mindlessly do them that way. For couples who give their child both parents’ last names, I suspect it’s out of a sense of fairness: We’re in an equal partnership, our child will share our last names equally. And that makes sense. Except, of course, that naming conventions in the United States have been patrilineal for generations, and are still almost entirely patrilineal. Choosing a matrilineal one helps to normalize it, and forces others to consider their own choices and defaults. Maybe in a couple of centuries of matrilineal naming, once things have more or less evened out, we should go to name-sharing. In the meantime, though, passing a mother’s name down is one of the rarer feminist acts one can choose.

This is particularly galling given that there are more single mothers in the US than ever before, and many, many of those women have children with men who are wholly or largely uninvolved, and yet the kid is still named after barely-there Dad. Even when they are married to or coparenting with their children’s fathers, mothers continue to do the bulk of childrearing, and especially the bulk of the tasks that make it easier to share a last name — doctors appointments, school pick-ups, coordinating playdates.

Claire Cain Miller, one of my favorite reporters, wrote about this dynamic in the New York Times, and one thing that struck me about her reporting is that even the couples who rejected patrilineal naming conventions and got “creative” with their children’s last names largely didn’t just pick mom’s. They blended their last names into a new one, or switched last names with each kid; in one family, dad’s last name went to the children, while mom’s went to the pets (I would divorce my husband for even suggesting that as a compromise). Even among people who don’t hew to tradition, there seems to be something particularly intolerable about just giving a child its mother’s last name, and her name only.

Talking about marital name-changing and the rank sexism of patrilineal naming conventions can be fraught, because it’s so wrapped up in our ideas about love, family, tradition, and identity. It’s very personal, and whenever I write about it, people get very angry, because they feel personally judged. So to be clear, my general view is that we’re mostly doing our best in this life, and no one makes perfectly feminist choices all of the time. The work of feminist movements and feminist writers, though, is to critique the patriarchal and the misogynist, even if it makes some people feel bad. And a naming convention that erases a woman’s name when she marries, and passes on fathers’ names down through the generations, is a patriarchal and misogynist one. We should interrupt it if we can. And if we can’t, or if we choose not to, we should own that: That life is often a series of compromises; that this just isn’t the feminist battle we’re choosing to fight.

I often hear a few things when I write about name changing. The first is: “It’s my father’s name anyway.” By that logic, though, women just don’t have names. And if your name isn’t really yours but actually your father’s, why are you saying you too your husband’s name? Didn’t you take his father’s, or grandfather’s, or however far back we want to go? Our names are our names. If you don’t want to carry your father’s with you, you can change it when you turn 18. And again, there’s no shame is taking a husband’s name — let’s just be honest that it’s not because your own name is patriarchal and therefore expendable or not attached to you in the way that your husband’s name is attached to him. It’s your name.

Another: His name was better. Maybe! But men don’t seem to change their unattractive, and it is statistically impossible that the men got all the good surnames. (It’s also statistically impossible that women got all the bad dads whose names they don’t want to carry).

And another: I thought feminism was about choice?? Of course it is. No feminist is trying to outlaw you changing your name. But feminism is also about looking hard at the choices we make, and how those reflect gendered power dynamics. Naming is one of the most obvious, personal, and pervasive.

You should (obviously) do what you want, and a newsletter saying “hey do this thing virtually no one else is doing” seems unlikely to twist anyone’s arm. But I hope, if what to name your child or what to do with your own name when you marry is a question you’ll need to answer at some point, that this plants a little seed. Our names matter: They are the words we put on our very selves. They reflect our cultures and our histories, the places and people we come from. They attach to our degrees and our accomplishments; they are the words our friends and acquaintances know us by. That women as a class still overwhelmingly change ours when we marry reveals a stubborn sexism to heterosexual partnership and, perhaps even worse, a deep romanticization of the idea that a woman’s identity folds into that of her husband when they marry — that, to paraphrase very old law that gave husbands near-total dominion over their wives, that in marriage the couple becomes one, and the one is the husband. That women as a class virtually never bequeath their surname to their children, and that men — the parties who do far less to actually carry, bear and raise children — says something awfully troubling about how much we respect motherhood, and how much we presume male authority over a household and children.

This is far, far from the most pressing feminist issue in the world. But there is little more intimate and reflective of our most deeply-held values than how we name ourselves and our children. Maybe we should make it a little more feminist.

xx Jill