In the Name Game, Tradition Usually Still Wins

“I never really thought about it.” “I didn’t care, and he cared.” “Hyphenated names are so cumbersome.” “It was important to his father that we pass on the family name.” “I didn’t really like my last name anyway.” “I gave my children my last name as a middle name.”

On and on it goes--the rationalizations of unconventional women who choose to do a very conventional thing: to give the child that emerges from their womb their husband’s last name.

As soon as a woman becomes pregnant, she becomes entangled in the surname debate. After queries about morning sickness, weight gain, C-sections and the baby’s gender, people ask the inevitable question: What are you doing for a last name?

And almost always, the children got the father’s last name. Of course, patrilineal naming assuages both marital conventions and male egos.

But there would seem to be plenty in our recent history to make women less likely to bow to such societal pressures. We’ve had three decades of skyscraping divorce rates and a growing contingent of deadbeat dads. Meanwhile, happily married women increasingly work double shifts as the primary parents and breadwinners of their families. Yet the patrilineal torch has hardly flickered. Rarely do women give their children their last names--even after divorce leaves them as sole providers and caretakers. (Though they often pay the several hundred dollars it takes to erase the taint of an estranged spouse from their own identity.)

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So why is it that when the woman wants everyone in the family to have the same last name, she immediately assumes that it is she who must change her name? Why do so many career women go through the rigmarole of maintaining two last names--one for their work and one for their family?

Political theorist Jackie Stevens, author of “Reproducing the State” (Princeton, 1999), looks at how last names were originally an invention of political societies seeking to make nationality seem natural rather than man-made.

“One of the ways we think of our national identities as natural is that we can tell what people’s nationality is from their last names,” she explains. “Governments have put a lot of effort into deciding what we’re named. For example, there’s an official list of first names in Switzerland, and you have to choose one for your child.”

But how do the nation-building origins of the surname shed light on personal choices made by modern couples?

“Inheritance laws, political bodies, surnames--it’s all about compensating for men’s inability to give birth,” Stevens contends. “The surname remains the only way of showing legitimacy. Without it, there’s no certainty that the kid has a legal father.”

Stevens also hazards a psychological hunch that women still want to demonstrate that they’ve nabbed a man.

“That’s especially important if women are keeping their own last names,” she says. “It’s ironic because keeping one’s maiden name is supposed to be feminist--but it may ignite that old anxiety about legitimacy.”

In her current book, “The Power of Feelings” (Yale University Press), psychoanalyst Nancy Choderow addresses this conundrum--how many so-called “personal choices” often have internal and unconscious meanings. Like Stevens, she feels that patrilineal surnaming is about a woman giving her child and its father a definite connection. But she casts the choice in a more positive light.

“[Giving the man’s last name to the child] can be a way of having a sense of two parents,” she explains. “It’s also a way of trusting in the marriage--saying, ‘This is someone I can count on.’ It’s about enjoying the good parts of being part of a family, of feeling somehow that this man is making a commitment.”

Why are so many men still so attached to their last names?

“Identification with the father,” Choderow says. “I don’t think it’s any mystery. The mother has the baby in utero, but the name is how men get tied to their babies. The tie has to happen somehow that ‘this is my baby too.’ ”

Choderow also notes that many young feminists are choosing their battles more carefully.

“Women are making choices about where they think it’s important [to change]--maybe they’re focused on getting men more interested in child care,” she says. “They’re also learning that every time you do something that’s traditional, it doesn’t mean that you’re not a feminist.”

Evolutionary biologist Helen Fisher doesn’t dispute Choderow’s notion of patrilineal naming as a linguistic umbilical cord, but she casts the idea in biological terms.

“It’s tremendously advantageous to think that the father belongs to [the mother and the child] for Darwinian evolutionary reasons,” Fisher says. “The main reason for marriage is for women to get a man to not only sire her children, but to help raise them.”

Even with the high rate of divorce, the increasing economic power of working women and the decline in marriage, Fisher doubts that the prevalence of patrilineal naming will change any time soon. Why? Because illegitimacy is not just a paranoid male fantasy.

Studies of blood types in the 1940s revealed by accident that as many as 10% of children were not the children of the man they called father, she says. Paraphrasing from her recent book “The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women,” she adds: “That’s a huge percentage, and women are deeply driven to have their husbands think that a child is theirs because if it isn’t, he may not give resources or he may abuse the child.”

That women have a choice of surnames at all is only a relatively recent development in legal history. Originally, patrilineal names were part of the British and American common law called “coverture,” in which a woman lost her legal right to own property, to enter into contracts or sue another party as soon as she got married. Sexist property laws began being dismantled 150 years ago, but even in the 1970s, many state bureaucracies still prohibited women from keeping their own names after marriage and giving their children their surnames. Interestingly, the last legal battles over patrilineal naming were fought not over love or tradition or civil rights, but rather over the true blood of our society: money.

According to Hendrik Hartog, Princeton legal historian and author of the forthcoming “Man and Wife in America” (Harvard University Press), whether a woman kept her own name only became truly irrelevant after women gained the right to have their own credit cards. Before that, a married woman could obtain a credit line only if she had her husband’s surname.

The state-by-state battles of the 1970s are all over. So why haven’t our naming rituals also changed? Hartog maintains that despite the societal campaign that began in the 1900s to “reinvent marriage,” much of what people do in marriage continues to be done out of habit--even when the tradition has no legal or financial roots.

“People find it very difficult to imagine being married and not doing what their parents did,” he explains. “There’s a powerful pull toward the reproduction of tradition. Of course, there’s enormous divorce and people having children outside of marriage, but still, when people get married, they’re doing something that’s historically grounded.”