By Mary Toy

Yesterday I was reading through the comments on a post about the SAVE Act and what documents people might need to vote.

A number of women were pointing out that if your birth certificate doesn’t match your current legal name — which happens all the time if you took your spouse’s last name — you may have to track down (and pay for) certified copies of marriage certificates or other records to prove citizenship.

And a lot of the responses were basically:

“Women are smart and capable. They can handle getting those documents.”

 Which made me think… wait a minute.

I was married. I can tell you with absolute confidence that if someone had suddenly asked my husband to produce a certified copy of his birth certificate or our marriage certificate, he would have had no earthly idea where to find them.

So why should that burden fall almost entirely on women who did exactly what society expected them to do — change their name when they got married?

That’s when I made the post.

And the comments that came in really proved the point. One woman said she had to track down her 95-year-old mother’s marriage certificate from Jefferson City — only to find out her birth certificate spelled her name “Delores” instead of “Dolores,” which meant correcting a 95-year-old document before she could get an ID.

Another said her ex-husband threw away their marriage certificate when he left, so she had to order a new one just to straighten out her own documents after the divorce.

Someone else said they kept their ex’s birth certificate and Social Security card in the family safe — and it took him six and a half years after the divorce to even realize he didn’t know where they were.

Exactly.  As my mom used to say, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

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Note: As of 02.26.2026, the post received more than 6,200+ likes and 3,700+ shares on Facebook.