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.)