One meaning of citizenship is membership in a national political community. Such membership is ordinarily the precondition for the rights and obligations that confer political personhood to citizens. In the United States, nationality or passport citizenship can be acquired in three ways. The primary determinant for U.S. nationality is territorial birthright: by virtue of being born on U.S. soil (jus soli), one is automatically an American citizen. Persons born abroad are also born into U.S. citizenship if either parent is a U.S. citizen. A third path to citizenship is through naturalization.
Throughout most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these principles did not apply equally to all persons. Under the naturalization laws of the early Republic, naturalization was available only to whites. Under mid-nineteenth-century naturalization policy, foreign-born white women who married U.S. citizens were automatically naturalized, whether or not they wanted to be U.S. citizens. Under the naturalization law of 1907, U.S.-born women of all races lost their nationality citizenship when they married noncitizens. Also, from 1855 to the 1930s, children born overseas to U.S.-born women did not automatically acquire U.S. citizenship; those children enjoyed automatic U.S. citizenship at birth only if their father was a U.S. citizen.
Race and marriage mediated women's nationality status until the 1930s. From the constitutional Founding through the Civil War, African, Indian, and Asian women and men could not be naturalized. Mexicans in the Southwest could become naturalized after the mid-nineteenth-century U.S. conquest of Mexican territory, and Africans were permitted naturalization under post-Civil War legislation. Except for those Indians whose tribal treaties with the U.S. government provided naturalization rights, Indians were excluded from naturalization until 1924. Until 1952, Asian immigrants were deemed "ineligible for citizenship."
Racial barriers to U.S. citizenship interacted with the legal and ideological subordination of women to men in marriage to deprive even U.S.-born white women of secure and independent nationality citizenship. Although early-nineteenth-century judicial decisions considered women's nationality status to be independently determined by the territorial condition of their birth, by the mid-nineteenth century, women's nationality was tied to that of their husbands. Following the family law doctrine of coverture, according to which married women assumed the state or domicile citizenship of their husbands, the Naturalization Act of 1855 imposed citizenship on foreign-born white women who married U.S. citizens. This assigned political consequences to women's marriage decisions; it also reinforced the idea that by consenting to marriage, women consented to multiple forms of dependency on and subordination to men.
The 1907 naturalization policy added a punitive dimension to women's derivative citizenship by revoking the nationality status of U.S.-born women who married men from other countries. Reform of nationality rules affecting women rose to the top of the post-suffrage feminist agenda. Led by the Women's Joint Congressional Committee, a lobbying group consisting of the heads of many women's organizations, feminists pressed for independent nationality citizenship for women. In 1922, a nativist Congress intent on restricting immigration and immigrant participation in U.S. political life passed the Cable Act, which ended the automatic naturalization of foreign-born (non-Asian) women who married U.S. citizens.
Although not fully satisfied with the new law, feminists saw it as a shift toward independent citizenship, because the Cable Act required foreign-born married women from races eligible for citizenship to go through the naturalization process as independent individuals and because it ended U.S.-born women's automatic loss of citizenship when they married noncitizen men, unless the men were Asian. The Cable Act retained loss of citizenship provisions for U.S.-born women who married "aliens ineligible for citizenship"—Asians. This meant that U.S.-born women who chose to marry Asia-born men would continue to pay for their decision with their nationality. This was especially burdensome for Asian American women who chose to marry immigrant men within their own cultures.
During the nineteenth century, nationality law repeated family law and gender ideology, strengthening the rule of U.S.-born white husbands and fathers and declaring their families American. After 1907, nationality law worked simultaneously to regulate women's marital decisions and to enforce racist and nativist goals. However, by the early 1930s, under pressure from women's groups and as a result of women's changed political status, Congress removed the barriers to independent nationality citizenship, at least for women deemed "eligible for citizenship."
Gwendolyn Mink
See also
Citizenship;
Immigration;
Legal Status.
