Prudie owns up to a June Cleaver judgment.

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Note from Prudie: When answering the letter about the baby taking the mother's last name, your adviser was apparently dozing, causing her to become Rip Van Prudie. This, in turn, produced advice that more properly belonged to the 1950s. Prudie realized she might have been wrong when a million letters told her so. (Well, it felt like a million.) She is reconsidering the answer with a great deal of input from her readers—the following is the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

The desire to bestow upon my child a name that will die with my generation (for some reason my family seems predisposed to having girl children) does not make me aggressive or combative. Your inference that this woman has a screw loose paints you as an inflexible, misogynistic old bag—a description that I never before would have thought applied to you. For shame!

—Sara P.

I doubt that there is anything sinister underlying a woman's desire to name her child after herself. Your question to the man about whether or not his wife was a "militant feminist" was uncalled for. Traditionally (i.e., archaically), a male gave his last name to his wife and children to designate that they were his property.

—Miffed in Iowa

I am guessing you are going to get many, many letters on this subject, so here's another one. I adore your column; I think you are wise and hip and everything good, so I am appalled that you used the phrase "militant feminist" in the way you did. One doesn't have to be a militant anything to think differently, and "militant" is a politically loaded adjective used to dismiss left-leaning thinkers without bothering to understand the issues.

—Heather W.

Tradition aside, I'd like to point out another possible reason for a child to take the mother's surname: the alphabet. I was born into a family with a surname that started with W. All my life I was called last for everything (except in elementary school—thank God for Frankie Yowaski!). I never really thought about it until I married a man whose last name began with B. That's when I discovered what a difference being at the front of the alphabet makes and how much discrimination is heaped on those whose names reside at the end of the alphabet. To this day I have a Far Side cartoon tacked over my desk; it pictures all the animals crowded around the ark and Noah intoning, "OK, we're going to do this alphabetically." Over on a hill is the pair of zebras with a thought balloon overhead: "S***!"

—Mary B.