CNN || Change your name after marriage -- why?

Lots of folks have Sunday morning rituals -- church, pancakes, watching football. I turn to the wedding pages.

Every Sunday, I open up The New York Times to check out the wedding announcements.

They call that "the sports section for women," which is annoying, because it presupposes that, because I'm a chick, (a) I don't like sports and (b) I love weddings. To which I say, (a) I know what a hat trick is and (b) wedding invitations are just bills written in calligraphy.

No: I check out the wedding announcements because I want to see how many women change their names.

I am freshly gobsmacked every single Sunday morning when I see that about half the women -- mostly under 35, all women with careers, all women who chose to submit their announcement to the putatively liberal New York Times --are electing to give up their identity. Oprah.com: What happily ever after really looks like

What would Lucy Stone say? She was a 19th-century suffragist who was the first American woman to revert to her birth name after marriage. She even had to chastise one Susan B. Anthony by writing to Suze, "A wife should no more take her husband's name than he should hers." Stone's followers -- women who refused to change their names upon marriage -- were called Stoners.

Today only about 20 percent of American women are Stoners. In other words, 80 percent of women change their identities -- I mean, names -- upon getting married.

It makes me wish we were a more progressive country like...Iran. Yes, Iran, where Muslim women keep their names for life. So must women, by law, keep their names in Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Chile, Malaysia, Korea...I could go on, but I really like the way they do it in Spain. Oprah.com: What it's like to be 30 around the world