Bet you didn’t know this American history tidbit!
In 1907, Congress passed the Expatriation Act, which decreed, among other things, that U.S. women who married non-citizens were no longer Americans. If their husband later became a naturalized citizen, they could go through the naturalization process to regain their citizenship.
But none of these rules applied to American men who they chose a spouse. And he wasn’t eligible for citizenship, she could be denied!
WHAT? You’re saying? And rightfully so. Sounds terrible, doesn’t it?
Once American women got the right to vote in 1920, they started lobbying lawmakers, pushing them to recognize that their citizenship should not be tethered to that of a husband.
To shorten the sad story, laws did evolve and by the 1940s women born in the U.S. no longer had to limit their marriage prospects to native-born men or naturalized citizens.
Consider your family tree….. did this “trouble” affect any of your grandmothers??
(Thanks to a 2017 post by Tanya Ballard Brown on the NPR website, Code Switch.)
One of my husband’s relatives (an American) married a Canadian and lost her citizenship. I would not have known but got a hint for her from Ancestry for her citizenship papers. I almost didn’t look! But am glad I did, and read up on Yet Another Way that women are/were second-class citizens. Thanks for writing about it, Donna!
My grandmother was one of those. In 1910 she married my Danish grandfather and lost her citizenship. My grandfather never became a citizen. On the 1920 census she is listed as an alien.
My grandfather did not complete his citizenship application until several years after he married my grandmother. She still showed up on voting registration, etc. and I have found no indication that she officially lost her citizenship or was forced to be naturalized.