Feminist or not, there is an excellent reason to keep your name: Under ever-more restrictive ID requirements at US airports, DMVs, passport offices, etc., you’ll have a big surprise if all “your” names don’t match from birth til the present moment. You will have to produce, at great cost and time, a string of official certified documents proving your “ownership” throughout your life — that “you” are the same “you” who was born, took out a Social Security card, registered to vote, got married, had a baby or got divorced.

I lived in a state recently where many, many women surprised to be denied driver license renewals without “enough” documents — and every DMV clerk got to say what “enough” documents were and what they had to be. I imagine those women felt like they lived in a slightly different country when they walked out the door of the DMV than they did when they walked in ten minutes earlier.

The “security” these identity checks are supposed to provide hardly matters to women who obeyed cultural practices with marriage or were careless with keeping certified copies of every event in their lives because, until the last decade or so, we weren’t “that” kind of country. We are now.

If you never want to feel like a soiled piece of evidence dragging a chain of custody through your entire existence, KEEP THE SAME NAME AND MAKE SURE YOUR DOCUMENTS MATCH.