*A Top-Secret Password | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | July 31, 2026*
This week I visited a government office where, in order to verify my identity, I had to remember a password I had chosen years ago.
I couldn't remember it, so the clerk offered me a hint: It's your mother's maiden name.
"Oh, that's easy!" I said, and immediately spelled out: Handelsman.
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But while he was filling out the paperwork, I had a few quiet moments standing at the counter, and I found myself thinking about how effortlessly we have turned our mothers' maiden names into secret passwords.
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How effortlessly our mothers' family names disappear, generation after generation, and how completely accustomed we have become to that, as though it were simply a law of nature. We are so used to this erasure that we treat it as a given. The name disappears so thoroughly that it becomes the perfect secret password - something no one would ever think to guess.
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Would we ever imagine using our fathers' maiden names as passwords?
Of course not. Men don't have maiden names. Their surname is the same from birth until the end of their lives.
Men are never expected to change their names.
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Women, on the other hand, even in countries where changing one's surname is no longer legally required, still do so in overwhelming numbers. Studies suggest that this erasure has become so deeply ingrained that women, out of habit, or perhaps because of their partners' expectations, or perhaps because of their partners' parents' expectations - who knows - repeatedly give up their own family names and take on new ones.
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And the name they grew up with slowly disappears from history.
At best, it becomes a secret password.
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As I write this, I remember how my mother used to search for childhood friends from school. Naturally, she remembered only their maiden names. But how were you supposed to know what surname each woman had eventually acquired? Occasionally she found women who had kept their original surname in parentheses. Other times, she simply gave up the search and never reconnected with that friend.
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How many women have disappeared from the relationships of their early lives simply because their names disappeared?
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This question of women's surnames being erased has occupied me for years, and I wrote about it in my book Feminism as I Taught It to My Daughters. After all, it isn't merely a name that disappears. It is the memory of an entire maternal lineage.
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No matter which family we are born into, our surname is one that has been passed from father to son. Never from mother to daughter. As for the names of our mother, our grandmother, and our great-grandmother, chances are we cannot reconstruct them more than two or three generations back. And even then, those were their fathers' names, not their mothers'. The erasure has no end.
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I first became acutely aware of this when my daughters were born, and suddenly they no longer carried my name. It felt so strange. Didn't they also belong to my family's lineage, to their mother's? No one else seemed bothered by it. But after I went to the Ministry of the Interior and added my surname to theirs, everyone began asking me: But what will happen when they get married? How many surnames can one child carry? And what about their children?
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No one seemed troubled by the erasure itself. Yet everyone found a problem the moment I tried to undo it.
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Those questions were not asked out of malice, of course. They came from the genuine difficulty of imagining a different social order, and from the difficulty of questioning the one we all take for granted: the system in which, within the most basic mechanism of family memory - the family name - half of every lineage disappears in every generation. And it is always the same half.
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What, for example, would happen if family names alternated between the mother's and the father's with each generation? What if we carried with us the memory of two lineages instead of one? What would that do to our cultural memory?
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I tried looking for cultures that had found a solution.
In Spain, and across much of Latin America, every child receives two surnames: the father's first surname followed by the mother's first surname. But that solution lasts only one generation, because in the next generation only each parent's first surname is passed on. In other words, once again, only the paternal line survives.
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In Iceland there are no fixed family surnames at all. Instead, each person receives a name based on either their father or their mother. Rather than preserving lineage through surnames, Iceland preserves it through exceptionally detailed genealogical records, meticulous national registries, and a genealogy database that allows many people to trace their ancestry back through numerous generations.
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And yet, even in Iceland, most children still receive a name derived from their father rather than from their mother.
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In any case, perhaps no single name could ever contain an entire lineage. After all, each of us has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents. No single surname can carry all of that. Still, I find myself waiting to hear creative solutions - ones that are fair to every gender, and ones that do not so easily turn women into secret passwords.
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And finally, I remind myself that genetics remembers mothers far better than culture does. Biology contains a tiny set of just 37 genes - mitochondrial DNA - that every child receives from their mother, but only daughters pass on to the next generation. Fathers do not transmit it to their children at all. Geneticists use it to trace maternal lineages across thousands, even tens of thousands, of years.
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In other words, there is an unbroken maternal chain living inside our very cells, even though, in the cultural world of family and language, it is almost invisible.
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So today, at least for a moment, we've allowed it to be seen.
Wishing all of us Shabbat Shalom,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*