A Nationality of Her Own : Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship

In 1907, the federal government declared that any American woman marrying a foreigner had to assume the nationality of her husband, and thereby denationalized thousands of American women. This highly original study follows the dramatic variations in women's nationality rights, citizenship law, and immigration policy in the United States during the late Progressive and interwar years, placing the history and impact of "derivative citizenship" within the broad context of the women's suffrage movement. Making impressive use of primary sources, and utilizing original documents from many leading women's reform organizations, government agencies, Congressional hearings, and federal litigation involving women's naturalization and expatriation, Candice Bredbenner provides a refreshing contemporary feminist perspective on key historical, political, and legal debates relating to citizenship, nationality, political empowerment, and their implications for women's legal status in the United States. This fascinating and well-constructed account contributes profoundly to an important but little-understood aspect of the women's rights movement in twentieth-century America. In 1907, the United States Congress passed a statute declaring that American women must assume the nationalities of their husbands, and thereby began to summarily denationalize the thousands of American women who had already married foreign nationals. In A Nationality of Her Own, Candice Bredbenner follows the dramatic variations in women's nationality rights, citizenship law, and immigration policy in the United States and examines the impact of "derivative citizenship" and its relationship to the woman's suffrage movement during the late Progressive and interwar years. Bredbenner restores the issue of consensual citizenship for women to its original prominence in the interwar reform record of American female activists, and reveals the extensive impact and the severity of the federal laws that divested American women who wed foreigners of their status as citizens conscripted the allegiance of immigrant wives whose husbands were American men, and denied naturalization to any woman whose spouse was not an American citizen. Incredibly, as Bredbenner shows, the United States government did not relinquish this discretion over women's citizenship until 1934.