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I actually know a baby named Agnes but no Agathas yet. I think Agatha is cool in an abrasive sort of way, which I like because I'm sick of all of the soft traditionally feminine names that are so popular now, like Isabella and Sophia, which are giving girls a tacit message about femininity, or the anti-frill names like Harper and Addison, which are giving girls another sort of message. I do think names like Agatha are, apart from aesthetics, important, because they're strong feminine names, not masculine (read: strong or plucky) names used for women. In other words, if we must find meaning in this shift, we could say that the old sort of thinking is that we need to be like men to be strong, but the newer way of thinking is that there are lots of ways of being strong and none require adopting masculinity in any form.

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This is just one reading of the situation and of course I'm reading deep between the lines trying to make meaning of something that might not need any analysis whatsoever. But this is what I do, and I do enjoy doing it.

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