I would no sooner change my name than I would exchange my face for some other face. When it came time to have children, my husband and I discussed the name situation. Patricia O'Beirne T here are certainly lots of reasons for patrilineal naming and lots of feminists following that tradition in naming their children. People don't think it's your partner's kid if they don't have his last name.
Ostracism is awful though.
When we chose to create a new family name, which both my partner and I took as absolute surnames and which we gave to our two children, his parents took it as a rejection of their entire family. The stress and conflict were immense, on their side from rejections felt and on ours from the clear lack of understanding. Yet the implied inequality of giving a child their father's last name is a tradition worth the effort to demolish. In many Hispanic cultures, for example, a child gets the last name of the father's father and mother's father, in that order. Then when that child reproduces, he or she will pass on his or her father's name, dropping the mother's.