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Posted
Sunday, August 02, 2009 7:35 AM
| By
Bonnie Goldstein
When I was a girl, children who bore their mother’s surname were
typically considered legally “illegitimate.” Now that science can
settle paternity, questions of authenticity, legitimacy and
matrimonially-linked inheritances have thankfully faded from the social
consciousness. Jessica’s comment about hyphenated surnames though, and Kerry’s post
on “matrilineal cults” both made me think about the historically recent
phenomenon of couples who, for reasons of their own, assign their
children the mother’s last name.
Although many of my contemporaries in their 20’s had become Mrs.
Somebody, by the time I married in 1985, brides had begun to routinely
retain their own last names with, typically, future children carrying
the husbands’. By then, at 35, I had no interest in changing my
cognomen to Grady. I had grown into my Goldstein name and we were
inseparable.
Surprisingly, my 13-year-old daughter, though she would have been
happy to remain fatherless, changed her family name from Goldstein to
Grady. ... (Read more in Double X.)