Look, you’re a feminist who, in this particular case, made the non-feminist choice. That’s all. I assume it was the right choice for you, or you wouldn’t have done it, and that’s fine! But feminism is not, in fact, all about choosing your choice. It is mostly about recognizing when things are fucked up for women at the societal level, and talking about that, and trying to change it. So sometimes, even when a decision is right for you, you still need to recognize that you made that decision within a social context that overwhelmingly supports your choice, and punishes women who make a different one.
Having to listen to other feminists talk about why the tradition of wives taking their husbands’ names really sucks, and feel as though you’re being judged by them, is not punishment.
Having your ex-husband use the fact that you didn’t change your name as evidence that you “weren’t committed” in a custody battle is punishment.
For the record, I’ve never experienced anything like that, and I generally have no problems going through life with a different name from my husband. I’m not trying to claim my people are horribly oppressed here. But we are the minority of straight married women in the U.S., by a
lot. If you took your husband’s name, you basically have our entire society’s approval for that choice. That’s the reality. And even if it’s not happening (in the open) among you and me and our feminist pals, we are still living in a culture where it’s considered normal for a man to feel hurt if his wife doesn’t want to take his name–but highly abnormal for his wife to be hurt if he won’t take hers. We live in a country where it’s easy for a woman to change her name upon marrying a man, but considerably harder for men to change their names for any reason, for gay people marrying to take their partners’ names, for trans people to adopt new names that reflect their gender, for any of us to just up and change our names because we’re grown-ups and we’d like to–why do we treat this
one circumstance, being a woman marrying a man, as such a special case? We live in a country where loads of people, feminist and not, feel it’s important for a family to have a name that identifies them as a cohesive group–but almost no one considers making it the female partner’s name in a het couple, or a blend of the partners’ names, or a made-up name that suits them. People use “Don’t you want to have the same name as your kids?” as a guilt trip to get women to change their names, not as the beginning of a conversation about what a “family name” means to them.
So all I’m saying is, you made your choice in that environment. We all do. We all have our own individual and family and community and ethnic and religious contexts to consider, too. But in America, women who marry men are widely expected to take their husband’s names, and almost all of them do. That is a fact. So acting as though any of us can stand outside of that deeply sexist context and make a free, individual choice to take a man’s name is plainly ******* ridiculous.
I was intoducing myself, extending my hand to shake, saying, "Hello, I'm........glad to meet you!" (The "glad to meet you" was cover to disguise that I'd forgotten my name. 
