(One recent survey found that school pupils thought men taking their wives' surnames would demonstrate a "weak character" but the reverse would show women were "grown-up").
This 18th-century vogue for women keeping, or perpetuating, their surnames was controversial.
Maybe Roemer should also disclose the extent to which racial profiling and exaggerated security screening take place in the US for its darker and more "ethnic" citizens with "Muslim" surnames.
This article was amended on 8 August 2011 to remove a reference identifying "some of the island's wealthier families" as bearing the surnames of those from the Chueta community in contravention to the Guardian's editorial code on reflecting anti-semitic tropes.
The pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, had a vexed relationship with the surnames of the men with whom she was romantically involved.
But in many cases, these women found other ways to perpetuate their own surnames, thus cheating the companion tradition that had arisen from that of the wife taking her husband's surname: that of the children inheriting the paternal surname, too.
Others defended Amal Clooney and Cheryl Fernandez-Varsini, claiming that women's surnames mean little to them, that the birth name is usually the father's name anyway, or that their decision to take their husband's name showed that they were truly committed to the partnership.
Today there are 15 popular surnames on the island that originate from the Chueta community.
They strove to eliminate patriarchal systems of oppression, and the most radical was to subvert the blatantly phallocentric ritual of surnames.
These sons of famous fathers have done their best, but they were never going to live up to their surnames.
British hereditary surnames are about 1,000 years old.
