When female celebrities insist on taking their husband's name over their own, they highlight society's pressure on women to conform

Nothing says I love you like supplanting your identity with that of your spouse, apparently. This week Cheryl Cole (nee Tweedy), the beautiful and highly successful member of UK pop group Girls Aloud, wowed onlookers by revealing a tattoo across the nape of her neck. It reads "Mrs Cole". She is married to the football player Ashley Cole. Last week, Sarah Michelle Prinze (nee Geller), best known for her vampire-ass-kicking persona Buffy, announced that she has officially changed her last name. What else would be the perfect surprise "anniversary gift" for her husband, the actor. Freddie Prinze, Jr? With their saccharine sweet sentiments, what both women have demonstrated is that marriage is still an oppressive institution. Once a woman has a ring on her finger she is no longer an individual, but a wife. Her existence is defined by her husband. This is an archaic concept, but one that still stalks us like a dark spectre.

It's been said that "a rose by any other name smells just as sweet," but this is not true. Call a rose a shit stick and suddenly people will be reluctant to send or receive a dozen of them on Valentine's Day. And if it were true, then there would be no precedent for women taking their husband's surnames. If a woman retains her maiden name following marriage, she enters into the commitment as an equal partner, maintaining the individuality and the history she forged during her pre-married days. If she loses her surname, she buys into a tradition that has kept women subservient since Eve ate that apple. But this is what women are expected to do: to sacrifice a sense of self for the "greater good," and there is a stigma attached to any alternative.

The idea has permeated the national consciousness to such an extent that keeping your own name, or expecting your husband to take your last name, is considered transgressive. A man appropriating his wife's surname becomes a source of amusement - he is chided, considered weak, the very act an affront to the masculine control that the custom hopes to maintain. Through marriage, a woman becomes the property of her husband and so, like cattle, she has to be tagged, lest she should stray.

Cheryl Cole, 24, and Sarah Michelle Prinze, 30, both have fantastic careers, their prominence in the public forum far outweighing that of their respective husbands. I know little about Ashley Cole. I know that he sued two national newspapers following claims he was involved in a homosexual tryst. He plays for Chelsea and England, and so he can kick a football around on a piece of grass. I'm sure he is admired by many football fans. Freddie Prinze, Jr has starred in a couple of movies, mostly teen romantic comedies. He's handsome, but his performances on screen are hardly memorable. These men, though successful, are best known as the husbands of ambitious women, and this is the problem. Success is traditionally a masculine attribute. Marriage invested wives with respectability. Women were not allowed to pursue careers, and so through this holy union they achieved the social status and title they were denied in a professional capacity. This cannot be said today, although the same redundant belief systems prevail.

Granted, female employees generally don't earn as much as their male counterparts, but this due to the injustice of the wage gap, rather than inferior intelligence or ability. It's not unusual, then, for women to become the primary breadwinners, excelling in their chosen professions and exceeding the achievements of their husband, which makes many men feel inadequate and insecure. Cultural expectations are such that males have been conditioned to believe they are the providers, and that any woman who impinges on this function is somehow less feminine than the little wife who sits at home darning socks and rearing the young. There's nothing wrong with being a homemaker if that what one want, of course, but problems arise when those women who decide not to conform to this archetype are made to feel that they have betrayed their gender.

Cheryl Cole and Sarah Michelle Prinze have highlighted the social pressures placed on women to appear secondary to their husbands in the public eye. Cheryl Cole married in 2006, and by being branded Mrs Cole she wants to centralise her marriage as part of her identity. Sarah Michelle Prinze who, as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was a strong-minded, independent woman, married in 2002, and until recently kept her own name. The sudden decision to change, and conform to tradition, can be considered the direct result of sex-role stereotyping that would have wider society believe that a woman who fails to taker her husband's name is not fully committed to her partner. By labelling this loss of identity as a "gift," Sarah Michelle Prinze has endorsed the idea that it was something he was owed and deserved, instead of realising that she was losing a part of herself in the process. By appealing to their primordial need for female ownership, however, both women have compensated their husband's for their inability to compete with them for public attention. It's just unfortunate that they felt they had to do that.