"Have you met the Awesomes? Marshall, Lily, their son Totally and their daughter Freaking?"

Thank you Katie, for sending me this article. I found it very interesting, as changing my name when I marry is something I have thought a lot about. At this point in my life, I want to keep my last name when I marry, if only because it would be such a pain in the bum to change it. My mom has changed her name 3 times (John to Carrabba, Carrabba to John, John to Sandford) and it was a huge hassle. She still finds things 10 years after the first name change registered to "Mary Carrabba". However, I worry about my future children - whose name would they take? will they be confused about their last name? I would never hyphenate their last name; they would have life of not being able to fit their names on standardized forms.

Although many subjects can send me into a feminist tirade (I'm talking about you, Cosmo), this has never been one of them. To me, it is a tradition the same way a father walking his daughter down the aisle is a tradition and they only have negative implications if you allow them to. Granted, this traditions are rooted in sexist practices, they don't carry the same meaning in today's society. I would also never be offended to be called by my husband's last name if I chose to keep my maiden name.

Some of the statistics were surprising - I was under the impression that keeping your maiden name was on the rise, but also understand that the surveys aren't current or expansive. I am also pleased to live in progressive Massachusetts - "one of the few states that doesn’t require men, and men only, to take the extra step and get a court order to change a last name after marriage."

These two paragraphs in the article really struck a chord with me though:

"While feminism and the equality it brought has become more or less mainstream, it has simultaneously “created anxiety about gender roles,” says Douglas. “There’s emerged a growing pressure to be both feminist and feminine at the same time. Maybe the trend [of taking a husband’s name] is just a little tiny piece of how women are pressured to or want to cling to a tradition that is very tied up with notions of femininity. It may be one of these gestures to traditional femininity that is part of women’s everyday calibration of themselves. We can’t seem to be too manly, because women do get punished for that.” So although women can exercise equality professionally by taking on traditional male roles like breadwinner, CEO, or political leader, they are expected to balance this out by embracing hyper-femininity.

This balancing act shows up in many ways. For instance, women who out-earn their husbands do a larger percentage of the household chores -- a traditional female role -- than do women who earn less than their husbands. In her book, Douglas explores the public drubbing handed out to former US Attorney General Janet Reno, a woman who Douglas says “looked at the masquerade of femininity and said ‘no.’ Women punish very visibly other women who do that -- with humor, so it doesn’t look too sexist.”

Women receive contrasting messages to act feminine at certain times and masculine at others (again, talking about you Cosmo). This article even suggest that being feminine and feminist are mutually exclusive. If feminism is right, is femininity wrong? Or vice versa? I don't think so, but I think some women do. One unfortunate thing about feminism is that the few radical feminists out there are VERY loud and their ideas are the ones associated with being feminist. For example, a few years ago I joked to my roomate at the time "I just came to college to find a man" and she very aggressively chastised me for being anti-feminist...even though it was just a joke. Part of my college experience was learning to separate the scary, bra-burning, anti-male feminism from the everyday feminism that most women agree with (equality!).

The second paragraph is dead on, but I'll leave the conversation about the social pressure to physically conform to gender roles for another day.