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 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.
In 2002, researchers found that about 97 percent of married couples passed down only the father’s last name to their first kid. 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. 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.
Even in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, patrilineal surnames are a surprisingly new convention. As Deborah Anthony, a professor of legal studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield, outlined in a 2018 paper, surnames in England prior to the 17th century weren’t standardized. Many signified a profession (such as Potter) or place of residence (such as Hilton, short for “hill town”).
This article appeared in The Atlantic on Oct. 27, 2021.