The logical thing to do is to have female children get the last name of their mother and male children to get the last name of their father. No more paternalism, entirely practical.
Maybe, but wouldn’t it be a little confusing? In my family growing up that would mean 3 people with one last name, and 3 people with another. I would have had to keep explaining that “Bob and Joe Smith” are my brothers.
Aren’t surnames in Iceland kinda like that? I know that in addition to many names ending in -sen there are many ending in -dottir (daughter?) as well. I don’t claim to know their naming system, but it has been a point of curiosity for a while. Maybe now’s the time to find out the facts – if somebody has some.
I worked with a woman who had a rhyming hyphenated name, similar to Naylor-Taylor. :smack:
Sort of, they generally come from the father though. -son means son of and -dottir means daughter of.
Magnus and Inga have a son Bjorn and a daughter Olga. The son is Bjorn Magnusson and the daughter is Olga Magnusdottir.
It is possible to take the mothers name the same way but not nearly as common.
Just because the wife hyphenates, why do you assume the children will have a hyphenated name?
There are many options in addition to hyphens - all kids get dad’s name, boys get dad’s and girl’s mom’s (or vice versa).
Plenty of cultures either combine wife & husband’s surnames when addressing the woman, or women keep their own names and never change them. This doesn’t lead to the problems you mentioned.
I hyphenated in the 1980’s and it goes back as far as the 70’s - it was no means a “fad” of the 90’s.
And despite my legal name being hyphenated, busy-bodies are always trying to tell me it’s not really hyphenate, that I “must” have one surname as a middle name and one as last name, or tying to pick one over the other, and so forth.
It’s my frickin’ names folks. Deal with it.
According to my great-grandmother, it leads to a whole lot of confusion. When her dad brought her brothers to the US, they kept his last name. But when her mom and the girls arrived, someone at Ellis Island decided to give them all the mother’s maiden name. Apparently it was no fun.
You’d be surprised how quickly you learn to deal with it. Step-families have different names all the time. Thanks to divorce and remarriage and a slightly insane stepmother (she was insane then. She got better.), I grew up with two stepbrothers with two different last names than each other or their mother, and her name was different than my dad’s and mine. It was like answering for a friggin’ law firm whenever someone called: “Jones, Smith, Jabobs, Dugan residence. How may I direct your call?” 
We just finally gave up correcting our teachers when they called for “Mrs. Jacobs” (who didn’t exist), and said, “Hang on, here’s Christopher’s mom.”
Now in my household we have three with the same last name (my husband, daughter and I) and one misfit - my son has his sperm donor’s name. We’ve asked him if he wants to change it and he says no (although he wants to draw up adoption papers when he’s 18 and doesn’t have to get his bio-dad’s permission), and he’s old enough, IMHO, to make that decision for himself, so there you go. Teachers expect it more these days, and most of the school forms have last name blanks for the parents, not assuming they’ll be the same as the kid’s.
The Spanish system works much like that. If Juan Gomez Trujillo marries Maria Martinez Fonseca, their children will be Jose and Carmen Gomez Martinez. If Carmen then marries Sr. Orosco, she becomes Carmen Orosco de Gomez, and their children have the surname set Orosco Gomez. In other words, the patronymic surname, the one carried on from father to son, is the penultimate one, and appended to it is the matronymic one, betokening descent from the mother’s family, which is dropped in the next generation.
But if famous paleontologists Richard and Maeve Leakey had had a daughter who married Col. Henry Fawcett, would she thereafter have been Ms. Leakey-Fawcett?
The situation in your current household I understand, and sounds workable. The one in your family of origin sounds hideously confusing! I lost track of it just while reading your post! Dang.
Lemme try again.
Marilyn Madison married John Jacobs and took his name. They had a son, Jason Jacobs.
Marilyn Jacobs, née Madison, divorced John and married Daniel Dugan, taking his name. They had a son, Doug Dugan.
Marilyn Dugan, once Jacobs, née Madison, divorced Daniel and, for late 70’s strident feminist reasons, took her mother’s maiden name, becoming Marilyn Smith.
Marilyn Smith, once Dugan, once Jacobs, née Madison, married my father, Jerry Jones, but didn’t take his name - she was sick of changing her name. She kept her mother’s maiden name, which she’d been using for years.
I had the same last name as my father, Jones.
So when the two boys (half brothers) and I (the step-sister) were home with Marilyn (their mom) and Jerry (my dad), we were Jones (x 2), Smith, Jacobs and Dugan.
I know, I know. It makes my head spin a little and I was there! We used to joke that we needed a flow chart just to set the table for dinner.
All names made up. And poorly, too.
Oh. My. Goodness. I get it now, but I would not be surprised if you forgot your OWN name from time to time! 
My family is pretty boring…we all have the same last name. And my mom is an only child, so all the cousins I have are on my dad’s side, and THEY all have the same last name. It’s an unusual name, too, so I have no trouble tracking who is related to me…if someone has my last name, chances are, they are a relative. If they don’t have the same last name, then they aren’t! So maybe I have an equally unusual experience, but from the other direction!
Now that I think about it…my family IS strange. No divorces in either my parents’ generation, or my own. 11 first cousins, 9 of us married, anywhere from 1 to about 20 years, and all of us on the original spouse. I wonder how common that is.
Not hyphenated, but my mom knew a woman named Wilma Hindley. She married a man named Findley, so she became Wilma Hindley Findley. I always liked the sound of that.
My sister hyphenated her last name with that of her husband for several years before finding it too much of a bother with government, banks, various databanks, etc., and returning to just using her original maiden name.
I love mismatched hyphenated names, like Windsor-Rizzo or Goldblatt-Nahasapeemapetilon.
Yeah. Me too. Ones like Wong-Gonzalez, McKenzie-Popadopolos, Nilsson-Nakamura, Graham-Dahmer, this could go on a long time, if left unchecked.
I knew a person who had a hyphenated last name that was (fortunately or unfortunately, depending how you look at it) the same as a famous landmark. Such as Joe Carnegie-Hall. I always got a kick out of it, but the owner of the name took it quite seriously and affected this “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean” attitude if anyone reacted to the “Carnegie-Hall” part.
I always thought while I wouldn’t usually go the hyphen route, if it turned out to be the same as a famous landmark, I wouldn’t be able to pass up the opportunity.
I have a friend who has a Chinese-Irish combo, which I have always thought was very cute.
Or O’Malley-Benedetti-Throatwobbler-Mangrove-Goldstein-von-Ostensacken.
Usually though, wouldn’t the children normally either take the father’s birth name or a hyphenation of just both parental birth names? To achieve the intended purpose I don’t see why the names keep having to get longer by a power of 2 with each generation.
Absolutely. “Is your mum also called Smith?”, asked of little Smith Junior, ends up standard patter once you’ve dealt with enough kids. And they think nothing of it - you can guarantee that even if they’re in a simple traditional situation, not all of their friends are.
I like this system a lot. Especially as I’d hate to bestow my very mundane and slighlty impractical (due to glottal stops) surname on any potential wife (ha).