If ever there was a case to be made for keeping your maiden name after marriage, Sarah Richmann has it. Richmann, 28, is getting married in June to someone named Bill Palin.
And she's taking his name. "It's a simplicity thing," explained Richmann, an administrator for a human services agency who lives in Roslindale. Plus, "I was really excited about getting married and I wanted my husband to know I was happy we were setting out on a path together."
She concedes there's some risk associated with having a name that's a punch line on "Saturday Night Live." "My phone was ringing off the hook when she was nominated as the running mate," said Richmann, who allows that she "doesn't necessarily share the same political views" as her Alaskan namesake. "Everyone was, 'I can't believe your name is going to be Sarah Palin!' "
But she didn't waver for a second. "Pretty much everyone I know is getting married now and taking their husband's name," she said. "I think this generation is just doing that."
I was taken aback when I heard that. When I got married in the late 1970s almost everyone I knew was not taking their husband's name. A lot of my friends weren't taking a husband either, or if they were, they rejected many of the trappings of marriage - engagement rings, white dresses, fancy china. After years of battling for equal rights, including a right our own mothers were denied - to apply for credit in their own names and not their husbands' - women officially got identities of their own and weren't too anxious to relinquish them, even symbolically, by forfeiting their surnames. "Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?" Betty Friedan famously asked in "The Feminine Mystique," a question that resonated throughout the '70s and made a lot of women, myself included, think hard about deciding to merge our identities with someone else's.
What tempered that anxiety was keeping our own names. I have an identity of my own, our names reminded us, even if our parents found this exasperating: For years my father addressed letters to us as "Mr. and Mrs." in deliberately oversized scrawl. But I never capitulated, and the social upheaval around me seemed so wide and deep I assumed the ground had shifted forever.
Now it turns out it was just a fad, like bellbottom pants, or drippy candles in straw-wrapped Chianti bottles. It was followed by a brief transitional phase when women hyphenated their names, producing offspring with names like British aristocrats. And now we're back to Mr. and Mrs. "I got engaged a month ago, and I have to say that long before I got engaged I doodled my future last name like a third-grader," says Jessica Jean Douglas, 29, soon to be Jessica Perez, a culinary school graduate who lives in Milton and works as a cook. "I always knew I wanted to take my husband's last name. It's more unified, as a family."
"Younger brides are definitely changing their names right away," reports Emilie Sommer, 30, a Maine wedding photographer who is getting married soon herself and admits she's struggling with the decision. She's leaning toward keeping her own name, she said, "but I have this weird sense of guilt about it."
Why has there been such a shift? "You could argue that they have given in to the patriarchy, or you could argue that their clarity about who they are is stronger than ours," says Susan Reverby, who teaches women's studies at Wellesley College and whose own daughter, "brought up in a feminist household," took her husband's name (Sixkiller) when she got married.
Personally, I would argue they've given in to the patriarchy. Hear me roar here for a second: What on earth are these girls thinking? That they're somehow immune from divorce? That a family with two names isn't really a family?
"They're rebelling," a friend tells me, she who is happily married for the second time but is stuck with her detested first husband's name because she's used it professionally for many years.
"How can they be rebelling?" I tell her. We were rebelling. How do you rebel against rebellion? (At some point, doesn't it cancel itself out, like multiplying one negative number by another?) Were the gains of the women's movement a lost cause?
"I don't think it's a lost cause at all," says Jessica Douglas-soon-to-be-Perez. "Maybe women's lib made such a statement it's more acceptable now to take on a new name."
And occasionally more advantageous, says the future Sarah Palin. "My husband jokes that I'll get good reservations in restaurants."
Linda Matchan can be reached at l_matchan@globe.com. 
