I understand the whole ‘down with patriarchy’ thing. But I think there are practical and aesthetic reasons to having only one last name. I’m from Quebec, Canada, where in the 70's they actually changed the law so that women now HAD to keep their maiden name. That’s right, in Quebec, a woman can’t change her last name to her husband’s even if she wants to. It came from a good place, the need for equality. But what about the kids?
Lets say Jean Tremblay got married to Marie Boucher in 1980. They had a kid. The government allowed them to give the child a last name of either Tremblay, Boucher, Tremblay-Boucher or Boucher-Tremblay. So we now have a bunch of people running around with those annoying hyphenated surnames. They are a mouthful and many actually end up choosing one or the other for every day use.
But things really get messed up when two people with hyphenated surnames decide to get married and have kids. ‘Hey honey, you know who we haven’t had over for brunch in a long time: Michel Boucher-Tremblay and Jeannette LeBlanc-Cormier’ … barf. I’d rather be able to say ‘lets invite the Tremblay’s over for brunch this weekend’.
And what happens when Michel Boucher-Tremblay and Jeannette LeBlanc-Cormier have kids. You’re going to love this. The government allows them to assign one of the following surname: Boucher, Tremblay, LeBlanc, Cormier, Boucher-Tremblay, Tremblay-Boucher, Leblanc-Cormier, Cormier-LeBlanc, Boucher-Leblanc, Boucher-Cormier, Tremblay-LeBlanc, Tremblay-Cormier, LeBlanc-Boucher, LeBlanc-Tremblay, Cormier-Boucher or Cormier-Tremblay. What’s more, parents are allowed to choose any of these options for each of their kids. So you end up with siblings with very different last name. One girl could have a surname of Cormier-LeBlanc and her brother of Boucher-Tremblay.
You see, anyway you slice it, a families last name gets dropped somewhere along the way. Besides, people tend to drop one of the last names in every day conversations anyways. The traditional convention had the merit of being simple, understood by everyone, and of contributing to a family’s unity and identity.
Remember those big family reunions where you’d get 100 Tremblay’s together and you could actually send invites that said ‘you’re invited to a big Tremblay’s family reunion’. How the heck does that work now? In wanting to push equality through every little aspects of our society, we are sometimes sacrificing practicality and in this case, a form of social unity and cohesion. In the case of surnames, I’m not sure the trade-off was worth it.