Apologies in advance for a long posting. This is just a few musings I've had recently on the subject of surnames and I'd be interested to hear people's comments.
Surnames have not been around for very long. I?ve heard it said that, in England, surnames were introduced by the Normans so that taxation would be simpler to administer if they could easily track inheritance through surnames. So, surnames in the UK are barely 1000 years old. Therefore, far too young for there to be any connection with genetics.
So, given that so many men seem to be inordinately attached to their surnames, no matter how unpleasant they might be, where does this come from? The source can surely only be social conditioning. By the same token, the apparent lack of attachment so many women have to their surnames can also only be through social conditioning.
It has been said that surnames allow you to identify which clan or tribe you belong to. But, given that we have both a mother and a father, why is the tribe only associated with the father when the mother has an equal genetic claim?
This is an idea which has only recently occurred to me and I mention it, not from a position of any great knowledge, but as conjecture. Until fairly recently, by which I mean only a century or so, when modern science began to inform our understanding, much of Europe?s medicine and biology was based on knowledge handed down by the ancient Greeks. According to them, babies were formed only from the man?s ?seed? and implanted in the woman, whose function was little more than an incubator. Women added nothing to the genetic mix.
If for centuries we believed that women did not contribute to the genetic mix of children, it?s not really unsurprising that the children were only considered to be in direct inheritance of the male line, as any woman would do as far as incubating and raising the child. True, examples such as Henry VIII discarding wives because they couldn?t supply him with a boy baby doesn?t really fit with this theory. So, I might be wrong. But, reason and prejudice never were comfortable travelling companions, so my conjecture could still be correct.
So, we have the situation where modern societies are so large surnames are more or less essential. However, the tendency of married couples to still generally adopt only the male surname is based on the now disproved notion that only the male can pass on any genetic legacy to a child. For generations we have fully understood the role both men and women play in the genetic make up of children, yet we continue to live as if women are of no genetic consequence. How often have we wondered whether Ms X is any relation to that Mr X we knew 10 years ago? Yet, how often might we meet someone who is related to someone we know, but have no inkling of it because they are related through the female line because that connection has been broken through the discarding of women?s surnames?
Surely, no self respecting woman cannot feel indifferent to the marginalisation of her lineage based on an ancient misogyny, especially one that was underpinned by a complete misunderstanding of our biology.