SISTERS – and brothers too. If you’ve been wondering what it might take to get yourself denounced as an “aggressive feminist”, the question has been answered. Any woman can do it, without stripping naked or chaining herself to railings, though it does require the supreme effort of getting married. All you have to do is wed someone, keep the surname you were born with, and expect people to use it.

I can see why Miriam Gonzalez Durantez wasn't pleased to receive an invitation to an International Women’s Day event, addressed to “Mrs Clegg”. Though the distinguished lawyer and campaigner is indeed married to former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, she has a reputation of her own, and anyone involved in something so feminist-oriented as International Women’s Day would surely want her for her own “cojones”, not as the wife of Clegg. No wonder, when she posted the letter online, she tagged it with the word “irony”.

For this, she was derided, including by several writers in the Daily Mail, which had been calling her Miriam Clegg, or Mrs Clegg, in its pages for years.

The paper's writer Laura Perrins, denounced her her as an “aggressive feminist” who had "gone off the deep end on social media after being invited to an event to mark International Women’s Day – in her married name”.

Now, I’ve no idea if Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, who always uses her original name publicly and professionally, has adopted her husband’s name in any context whatsoever, and nor I think do those who keep referring to her as Mrs Clegg. They’re just going ahead and doing it, as if to say she’s an uppity woman, acting above her station by asking to be called by the name she's gone under all her life. For Gonzalez Durantez, by the way, comes from Spain – a country which does not have the tradition of taking the husband’s surname, but of keeping one’s own, itself a double-barrelling of mother and father surnames.

Worse still, Perrins declared: “Are we supposed to believe that International Women’s Day would have been interested in Miriam Gonzalez Durantez if she wasn’t also Miriam Clegg?”

Perhaps I too am an “aggressive feminist”. I never took my husband’s surname either, an act which I always thought was at the very mildest edge of feminism. Indeed it surprised me when people asked if I would change it, or even, afterwards, called me by my husband’s surname.

It still surprises me that so many women do change their names. For a start, it’s a bit of a faff. Changing it is far more work than keeping it. You have to get a new passport, change your bank cards, contact your utilities providers. All that for the privilege of conforming to a tradition that dates back to Medieval times when women were literally considered their husbands' possessions. Is it any wonder many people are rejecting marriage altogether, and going down the cohabitation route?

That keeping one’s name is considered an aggressive almost militant act seems a dire indication of the times we are in. A recent US survey found that half of people believed a woman should be required by law to change her name to her husband's after marriage. The most common reason? They believed she should prioritise her marriage and family ahead of herself.

Meanwhile, many women who change their names, regret it. Research by Siteopia found that 31 per cent of young wives who had taken their husbands' names wished they had kept the ones they were born with. Female divorcees often also express that regret, since there can be complications connected to their nomenclature, which don't arise for their ex-husbands.

Some might say it’s easier to change your name because it saves confusion. But these days that isn’t the case. Around a third of young wives in their 20s keep their names in some form, according to Facebook research from 2013. Many men are also merging and double-barrelling names on marriage, so we really shouldn't make assumptions about what married people call themselves.

Marriage is an evolving institution. We are remaking it for our times, and that requires some offloading of baggage. If you want equality in your marriage then things like changing your name, or promising to “obey”, probably aren't the best starting points.

No, the problem is not aggressive feminism, but apathy and the myth that everything has moved on for women and if they ask for any more – or even for as much as the feminists of past ages did – then they are rude.

But I guess that's just me being aggressive again. The next thing I know, I’ll be throwing myself in front of a horse, or marching for basic reproductive rights. Or, truth be told, eating the delicious tea cooked tonight by my husband and then babysitting our children while he goes out. For marriage has changed beyond measure – not just in the names and the titles, but the way that it’s lived.