“Both parents should be able to share the choice of a surname, which is a fundamental element of one’s personal identity,” the court wrote. For one, the name is the most immediate sense of personhood one grows up with. But even Shakespeare would agree today that names matter. One may be tempted to ask what truly is in a name. How the Indian System Keeps ‘Single’ Women Dependent on Others For now, the country’s parliament will have to pass legislation to implement the court’s decision. So court rulings that recognize the power imbalance become critical. These are ideas fraught with regressive sentiments, and are enforced by legal mandates. Or, it is the easiest way to ensure the family name’s legacy. This is a doctrine based on the patriarchal assumption that a father’s surname would deepen the family institution or provide children with more financial security later in life. Deborah Anthony, a professor of legal studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield, spoke of how “the mother almost always loses.” “There’s this implicit understanding that having the father’s last name is inherently in the child’s best interest,” she told The Atlantic. The question of who gets to pass down their last names is a legally and culturally contested conversation. In many Spanish-speaking places - like Spain, Puerto Rico, Mexico - children already receive the last names of both parents.
Globally, this practice has a sturdy precedent. This tradition of only sticking to the father’s last name, alas, is “discriminatory and harmful to the identity” of a child, the court said, as reported by Reuters. The court effectively overturned a deeply embedded cultural, centuries-old convention rooted in patriarchy. The Constitutional Court in Rome ruled a baby should be assigned surnames of either both the parents when they are born - or be given a new last name unrelated to both the partners. We inherit our father’s surnames by virtue of our culture and the system that insists that the male line is the locus of a family’s name and material possessions.īut an Italian court recently found this reasoning wanting. Be it Italy or India, look anywhere, and the patrilineal norm of naming children after the father’s family dominates. The holy grail of all traditions lies in the inflated corpus we know as patriarchy.