The Father's surname: A Default worth questioning¶
July 11, 2026
As my due date creeps closer, we've started filling out the paperwork that comes with having a baby in Germany. One of the routine questions is the baby's surname. Despite the surname already being written on the form, people almost instinctively refer to my partner's surname when talking to us, without even checking what we've entered. No one is trying to make a point—it's simply the default they've internalized. Those small interactions made me think about something I'd quietly taken for granted. My partner and I never really had a discussion about our child's surname—we had always assumed our child would carry both of ours. But listening to friends and family navigate the same question, I realized we still live in a culture where the father's surname is treated as the unexamined default, even when no one is consciously insisting on it.
The reasons people give are rarely ideological—they're pragmatic. I don't know a single friend who has chosen otherwise, and almost everyone defaults to the father's surname with the same familiar explanation: it makes the bureaucracy easier. But that baseline isn't natural. It's inherited. And it's worth asking what that default is actually built on.
The “bureaucracy will be easier” excuse sounds practical, but it doesn’t hold up. My own first name is eighteen letters long, following an Indian tradition of using my father’s given name as a middle name. Because passports and most official forms don’t practically separate first and middle names, that entire sequence simply becomes one unbroken given name. I’ve never encountered any real friction because of it. Systems adapt to whatever names we choose, the idea that paperwork requires the father’s surname is just a comfortable myth.
Others often argue that a surname barely shapes a child’s cultural ties anyway—that heritage lives in stories, rituals, and daily life, not in a single legal identifier. I want to be clear: no one advocating for hyphenated surnames, maternal names, or alternative naming structures is claiming that children will feel less connected to their mother’s heritage if they don’t carry her name. That’s not the argument. The point is that naming traditions did not develop in a vacuum. They were built by systems that equated continuity with men, and women’s names were treated as temporary, negotiable, or disposable. When we normalize giving children the mother’s surname, hyphenating, or creating entirely new naming structures, we aren’t erasing fathers. We aren’t suggesting a child’s love is divided or diminished. We are simply refusing to let an outdated legal and social default dictate family identity. These naming conventions weren’t born of custom or sentiment. For centuries, Western legal frameworks like Coverture legally absorbed a woman’s identity into her husband’s, making the father’s surname the automatic extension of patrilineal property and citizenship. Legal equality in naming rights is a modern achievement, won through decades of feminist advocacy rather than inherited from ancient tradition.
To be concrete: in Germany—the country where I now live—the law only changed in 2025, finally permitting parents to pass both surnames to their child as a blended Familienname. Until then, the default legal framework offered no path to a true fusion of parental names—only a choice between two existing surnames.
Social change rarely arrives as a wave. It arrives as a series of quiet decisions made by people willing to be the first. If hyphenated surnames, maternal names, or non-patrilineal structures ever become truly ordinary, it will be because people started practicing them before they were culturally “acceptable.” Feminist naming isn’t about imposing a new rule. It’s about dismantling the illusion that one rule was ever natural.
When my child arrives, their name will be a blend of ours. Not because it's defiant or modern. But because it's chosen. And in a world that still treats the father's surname as the default, choosing is a radical act.