The present practice of surnaming, by which the wife takes on the name of her husband and the children take on the name of the father, favors one of the sexes over the other. In this paper, the egalitarian surnaming system (ESS) is proposed. This system deals equally with the sexes and also serves important social functions, such as providing a basis of family identity for the nuclear group (same surnames for mother, father, and children) and for identifying a line over generations (same surnames for grandparents and grandchildren, for example). According to ESS, both the wife and the husband retain their before-marriage surnames but add the surname of the spouse just prior to it. Female children are given the dual surname of the mother, and the male children the dual surname of the father. When the children marry, they replace the first of their two surnames with the final surnames of their spouses. (Author/CLK)