Giving kids Mom's surname endangers species הענקת שם משפחה של האם מסכנת את המין האנושי

A friend who took his wife’s surname (yay!) sent me this piece of drek parading as science. On the one hand, I hesitate to even dignify it with a response. On the other, just in case anyone out there is looking to validate their giving their kid hizzer father’s surname, I felt that Goddess has called me to disabuse any such individual of that notion.

So this piece comes from a site called BigThink, which seems to be a forum for science-based arguments for…well, lots of stuff. I admit to not being even a little bit tempted to extend my visit beyond printing the piece out and getting the heck out of there.

Its premise is that aside from a few species (the others being avian), humans are the only ones whose males invest in the upkeep of their young, so therefore they’re insecure about their paternity, not wanting to support some other guy’s young by mistake. So in order to convince human dads to invest in their young, we must give our young their dads' surnames, which will assuage their dads' (collective unconscious?) fears that the young they’re upkeeping aren’t actually theirs.

The piece concludes by claiming that 1) A system wherein children take their mothers’ surnames is doomed to extinction evolutionarily speaking, as in such a system, the males will not feel compelled to look after their young; and 2) Therefore, “most known human cultures practice patrilineal inheritance of surnames.”

While that last one may be numerically true (how does one count cultures?), I doubt it’s the case on a per capita basis. The members of the Chinese and Hispanic cultures alone probably exceed half the world’s population, not to mention other cultures with which I’m not familiar. As for the first claim above, here’s the conversation with my husband:

Me: Uh, I don’t even know where to start. How about now we have this thing called DNA testing?

Husband: How about now we have this thing called civilization?!

Hmm. Can’t argue with that.

One Name: It's Not Monolithic שם אחד בלבד: לא בהכרח

While I reject Arianna Huffington’s advice to bloggers not to bother perfecting their writing, I’ve decided to accept another of her suggestions, which is to “Focus on one or two issues and…specialize in them…and…latch on to a certain issue and…don't let go of it.” The last fits me to a tee, as those who know me know well.

Having thus decided, in addition to my main posts, I’ll be featuring mini-posts on the left-hand side of the page on the subject of women not taking their husbands’ names. Most of these will be in the form of responses to various arguments pro and con that I find across the ‘net. For the nonce, I’d like to take up what appears to be one of the main sticking points of deciding on surnames for one’s children, i.e., the oft-repeated mantra of “all family members having the same name”.

First, allow me to dismantle the assumption that a uniform surname is somehow the obvious ideal. I'll illustrate with my own situation: My surname is Erez (yes, I changed my birth surname, before I married or even met my husband); my husband’s surname is Slott ― simple, no hyphens, we each stayed who we’d always been. Pleasant, spontaneous result: Quickly, with no urging on our part, we became the Erez-Slotts, which we quite like.

It therefore seemed natural to give our children the surname Erez-Slott, and it’s worked out fine: Teachers and airport passport-checkers easily see the connections and how everyone arrived at their respective surnames. Mail is addressed to “the Erez-Slotts” or “Miriam Erez and Bill Slott” or “Hedy Erez-Slott”. Each of us shares some part of everyone elses’ names, and I have never had the sense on any of our parts that we aren’t an intact family unit, or that we are somehow irregular. The fact that Bill and I have separate surnames has had no impact whatsoever on our marriage.

I can already hear the protests: “That’s fine if you’re the Erez-Slotts, or the Walker-Smiths. Suppose we’re the Terwilliger-McGillicuttys?” OK, OK [picture me calming an angry mob]: Write your child's name from the git-go as “Hortense T-M”*. Everyone quickly gets used to it (the caregiver, the school, the soccer coach) and soon everyone will be referring to you as “the tee-ems”, and shalom al yisrael, as we say here in the Em-Eee.

Yes, yes, I know: When the T-Ms’ kids’ marry, they’ll more than likely drop one of their names (optimistic here that they’ll carry on with some option other than Bride taking Groom’s surname). Yes, inevitably names will get dropped along the way, but at least the women’s names will have a better chance of lasting more than one generation; either way, we now have recorded genealogies and databases, so no one’s actual identity disappears, like it did so often under the old system.

So there you are: a close-to-perfect solution, certainly closer-to-perfect than any other. So no more excuses, ladies: Get out there and Stand By Your Names!

*This is acceptable on all but the most official documents―and how often, really, do we have to deal with those? Once it’s on their passports and SSNs, that’s pretty much the end of it.