Load more comments
Traditionally, it has been because children literally “belonged” to their father, and also land and property was passed down through the father.
These stories swerved radically from accounts of misogynist medical and legal practices to marital conflicts to the "it just seemed easier" riffs. Often there were aesthetic critiques of various phonemes. The endings of these diverse tales were almost always the same: The children got the father's last name.
Of course, patrilineal naming assuages both marital conventions and male egos. But there would seem to be plenty in our recent history to make women less likely to bow to such societal pressures. We've had three decades of skyscraping divorce rates and a growing contingent of dead-beat dads. Meanwhile, happily married women increasingly work double shifts as the primary parents and breadwinners of their families.
Patrilineal inheritance of family names is another social institution that emerged to convince the fathers of their paternity, by saying (if social institutions have a vocal cord) “The baby’s really yours, because it has your last name!” Russians take it one step further, by giving their children – both their sons and daughters – middle and last names after the father.
Fathers are therefore expected to invest more heavily in children who bear their last names than children who bear the mother’s last names, because they are more likely to be convinced of their paternity. As a result, ceteris paribus,children who inherit their last names from their fathers are expected to be more likely to survive and thrive than children who inherit their last names from their mothers.
In the first version, men are misogynists/bad guys trying to own and control things.
In the second, it is being used to convince men to look no deeper into the actual parentage of the child.
Both of them reference (directly or indirectly) patrilineal inheritance. But the spin on the first one is men are bad. The spin on the second one is a recognition of the problems of paternity assurance, in which men are compensated for the possibility that they may be duped into being a parent for a child that is not biologically theirs. It seems to lack of the emotional interpretation of the first version.