This is as much a reflection of the conversations that couples have-or don’t-as it is a product of desk-clerk-level policies. A large swath of American society has simply failed to conceive of a reality beyond patrilineal surnames.įew scholars argue that passing down a father’s last name is wrong for any given family, but the aggregate statistics point to an enduring patriarchal culture. Yet even among heterosexual couples in which each partner keeps their name, the father still passes down his last name to the kids the majority of the time. Three decades later, it was about 20 percent. The share of women who themselves kept their surname after marriage was about 3 percent in 1975, when some states still required women to take their husband’s name to register to vote.

“For a lot of partners and family, it’s habitual and unconscious.” This norm is especially striking when compared with other patriarchal relics that have been eroding. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’m not sure those are common conversations,” she told me. She suspects that many heterosexual couples aren’t seriously discussing what they want their child’s last name to be. Mallinson thinks that is partly because of inertia. Read: The gender researcher’s guide to an equal marriage Though few studies on the topic have been conducted, evidence suggests that in almost every American family with a mom and a dad, children receive their father’s last name. That proportion seems to have remained remarkably consistent: A 2017 paper studying adoptive heterosexual parents found that they gave a patrilineal surname to their child 96 percent of the time. In 2002, researchers found that about 97 percent of married couples passed down only the father’s last name to their first kid. Mallinson knew that their choice was not a popular one for heterosexual American couples-she’s a professor of sociolinguistics and gender and women’s studies at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, and wrote a 2017 paper that, in part, analyzes patrilineal surname conventions. The decision came down to family cohesion: The couple wanted their children-they eventually had two-to share a last name with the only cousin near their kids in age, who was Mallinson’s niece. About a year before Christine Mallinson gave birth to her first child, she and her husband agreed that all of their children would take her last name.

The inn between parents last names