On and on it goes -- the rationalization of unconventional women who choose to do a very conventional thing: to give the child that emerges from their womb their husband's last name.

In 1994, American Demographics magazine reported that in marriage, 90 percent of women still adopt their husbands' last names. The remaining 10 percent choose some alternative -- from creating hyphenated names to making middle names out of their maiden names. But only 2 percent choose to retain their maiden names as their sole surnames.

Given the numbers, one might assume that choosing a child's surname is not exactly a hot button issue in the domestic arena. But it is. Modern couples do sit down and hash out what to call their babies. It's one of the many emotional calisthenics performed in the name of intentional parenting.

As soon as I became pregnant, I became entangled in the surname debate. After queries about morning sickness, weight gain, C-sections and the baby's gender, people asked the inevitable question: What are you doing for a last name? If my interrogator was a mother, she'd usually reply to my answer with her own creation tale of her child's surname.

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.

Yet the patrilineal torch has hardly flickered. Rarely do women give their children their last names -- even after divorce leaves them as sole providers and caretakers. (Though they often pay the several hundred dollars it takes to erase the taint of an estranged spouse from their own identity.)

So why is it that so many women appear not to care about the names they give their offspring while their husbands do? Why is it that so many women just happen to have an aesthetic preference for their husband's name? Why do so many women choose to abdicate a symbolic connection to their children to avoid disapproval of conservative family members, even when they are willing to buck family tradition on other issues? Why is it that when the woman wants everyone in the family to have the same last name, she immediately assumes that it is she who must change her name? Why do so many career women go through the rigmarole of maintaining two last names -- one for their work and one for their family?

Are women just self-hating wimps and men old-fashioned swine? The diversity of women's explanations suggests that something else is at work quite beyond feminist politics or personal choice.

Unsatisfied by ham-fisted stereotypes, I went in search of political scientists, historians, legal scholars, biologists and psychologists who might cast more light on why most women make their first public act as mothers an etymological suicide, obliterating the most visible identifying link between their children and themselves.

Order "Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood" from the editors of Mothers Who Think.