Today, women aren’t legally mandated to give their husband’s last name to their children but U.S. bureaucracy has continued to enforce patrilineal naming conventions. Anthony has researched court cases in which couples battle over who has the right to pass down the surname to their kids. “The mother almost always loses,” Anthony told me. Individual judges have repeatedly used the legal doctrine of the “best interests of the child” to side with the father. “There’s this implicit understanding that having the father’s last name is inherently in the child’s best interest,” she said, citing cases where judges argued that taking the father’s surname would deepen the family relationship or provide children with more financial security later in life. Some states, such as Louisiana, maintain policies that enforce patrilineal surnaming as a default when the father is known and supports the children, unless both partners agree otherwise.

Other banal, structural factors have stymied more varied approaches to surnaming. When Alícia Hernàndez Grande, now a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University, got her driver’s license as a teenager in Houston in 2004, she remembers that the DMV tried to split her last name, Hernàndez Grande, into two parts. They printed her a license in which “Hernàndez” was listed as the middle name and “Grande” as the last name, shortening her name to Alícia H. Grande. Hernàndez Grande, who had moved to the U.S. from Spain at the age of 8, panicked. “It’s incorrect. It doesn’t match my passport. It didn’t match my green card,” she told me. When she and her mother pointed out the error, she said officials told her that they couldn’t add spaces in the last-name column. (Hernàndez Grande said that, as an adult, she managed to get the license corrected.)