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A STUDY IN MARRIED WOMEN’S RIGHTS AND REPATRIATION IN THE UNITED STATES, THE UNITED KINGDOM, AND LATIN AMERICA: CITIZENSHIP, GENDER AND THE LAW IN TRANSATLANTIC CONTEXT by STEPHANIE ANNE MCINTYRE Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON August 2014 Acknowledgements Despite the tremendous difficulties I experienced during my years long effort to write this dissertation, my Committee Chair, Dr. Elisabeth Cawthon, maintained consistent and encouraging support for me personally and as a student. Numerous times the thought that Dr. Cawthon would not give up on me propelled me forward in what seemed like a daunting task. After working with her in a class on British legal history, I learned first-hand about her exacting standards as a professor, so as I continued to research and write despite numerous obstacles, I always kept in front of me Dr. Cawthon’s high expectations as motivation to do the best work possible. I have known for some time that there will never be a way to thank her enough for all that she has done to help me complete this project. How do you thank someone who never gave up on you when 99 out of 100 others would have? Dr. Cawthon, words fail to express adequately my deep and sincere gratefulness to you for your unending support. Thank you. I also want to thank my wonderful and dear friend Vicki Plangman who has steadfastly encouraged me during this project. She has always supported me in our long friendship and without her encouragement and prayers, I could never have completed this paper. In addition, I thank my friend John Cavanaugh- ii O’Keefe who has always cheered me on and who gave me a vision on how to complete the dissertation. Thank you Dr. Palmer and Dr. Bateman for being on my dissertation committee and helping me by reading and commenting on the paper. I am very appreciative for your time and commitment to my cause. Dr. Fairbanks who brought me into the Transatlantic History program, Dr. Garrigus, and the other members of the faculty who gave me the time I needed to finish, recognizing that life and school do not always mix, I am truly grateful. Without your compassion and grace, I would not be writing this acknowledgement. I promised I would finish, given the chance, and I have. Thank you for giving me the chance. I am also very grateful to Dr. Patricia Gajda at the University of Texas at Tyler, who taught me to think and write about history in the tradition of the great historians who believed the sources should lead them. She first opened my mind to the idea of a global history, which inspired me to join the Transatlantic History program at UTA. As another exacting professor, I am grateful to Dr. Gajda for teaching me how to think, and write and speak about history in ways that required a tremendous amount of effort on my part, but which, in the end, served me well in completing this dissertation. A passing comment one night after class gave me the encouragement I needed to pursue a PhD. Thank you for your confidence in me as a student and as a person. iii Finally, I am extremely grateful to all the professors, several who have retired now, for teaching me. I enjoyed my experience at UTA and learning history from a transatlantic perspective; my thinking is forever changed as a consequence of my studies. Studying Transatlantic History at UTA has truly been a life changing experience. April 21, 2014 iv Abstract A STUDY IN MARRIED WOMEN’S RIGHTS AND REPATRIATION IN THE UNITED STATES, THE UNITED KINGDOM, AND LATIN AMERICA: CITIZENSHIP, GENDER AND THE LAW IN TRANSATLANTIC CONTEXT Stephanie Anne McIntyre, PhD The University of Texas at Arlington, 2014 Supervising Professor: Elisabeth Cawthon During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States and Great Britain, fearing the dramatic changes occurring in the Atlantic world due to increased migration and threats from war, denied many of their female citizens their natural-born right of citizenship. What was the reason for stripping these women of such a precious possession guaranteed by law? They married non- citizens. v Without due process, the women could not be deprived of their citizenship, so laws were put into place proclaiming that when a woman married an alien man, she would automatically assume his citizenship. Because women did not have independent citizenship under the law, upon marriage to an alien man, the woman lost her own natural born citizenship that had come through her father. At the same time these laws were passed, women were campaigning for the right to vote. Within the campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic, a kindred spirit developed among the reformers that all women should have the same right of independent citizenship as the natural born men in their countries. Being ignored by their home governments, the women of the United States and Great Britain and the Dominion nations developed a transatlantic network designed to bring international pressure on their domestic governments to grant independent citizenship to women by law. As a result of their consistent and longsuffering campaigns, many women of the United States believed they were going to be granted independent citizenship in 1922 with the Cable Act, but the bill fell far short of their expectations. Cable Act reforms began almost immediately and continued until 1936, when all American women had the right to determine their own nationality. The Dominion nations, beginning with Canada in 1946, established independent citizenship for women, despite imperial law. Britain finally succumbed to the transatlantic pressure and granted women of the United Kingdom independent nationality in 1948. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………… ii Abstract………………………………………………………………………... v Chapter 1: Introduction………………………………………………………... 1 Chapter 2: Historiography..…………………………………………………... 14 Chapter 3: England – Theory on Women’s Rights……………………..……. 39 Chapter 4: United States – Theory on Women’s Rights...…………………... 126 Chapter 5: Latin America – Theory on Women’s Rights...…………………. 208 Chapter 6: International Treaty for Independent Citizenship..……………… 257 Chapter 7: Conclusion………………………………………………………. 295 Notes………………………………………………………………………… 298 Bibliography…………………………………………………….…………... 322 Biographical Information…………………………………………………… 333 vii Chapter 1 Introduction The campaign for independent citizenship contributes significantly to the history of the transatlantic women’s rights movement. When studying the history of the women’s campaign for independent citizenship on an international level, it becomes apparent that women all over the world have had their own ideas of what citizenship meant to them, both historically and in their own day. What becomes more apparent is that women thought and wrote about, defined and worked toward citizenship equality within unique cultural, political, and economic contexts in Europe and the United States beginning in the seventeenth century and in Latin America in the eighteenth century. In England, women lost their independent citizenship officially with passage of the Naturalization Act of 1870. They did not marshal efforts to regain their nationality rights until they became conscious of the maltreatment that expatriated British women experienced during World War I. It would not be until the end of World War I that the lack of British citizenship, revealed through the devastating consequences suffered by many British-born women married to foreign-born men that British women mobilized to reclaim their nationality rights. The legal, political, and personal problems created by expatriation of native-born 1 women who married foreign-born immigrants inspired a movement that developed into an international campaign for women’s nationality rights in the United States, England, and Latin America.1 Contrary to the British experience, women in the United States may not have fully understood the consequences of the Expatriation Act of March 2, 1907, which was the American version of the British 1870 Naturalization Act, but just the name of the act itself was justification for raising feminist ire. Section 3 in the law included American-born women in immigration and naturalization policy. It claimed that American women who married foreign-born men had voluntarily surrendered their citizenship in the United States.2 All American women were forced to take on the nationality of their husbands upon marriage. The expatriated American-born women could reclaim their American citizenship only if their foreign-born husbands naturalized. Understanding that they lost a significant legal and political right, feminist reformers insisted that the loss of independent citizenship was a greater burden than the inability to vote. The Expatriation Act of 1907 marshaled feminist reformers in the U.S. who would launch an indomitable and lengthy campaign for the legal right to determine one’s citizenship.3 In the United States and England during the twentieth century, citizenship became a source of tremendous controversy, because the rules governing citizenship lacked uniformity and possessed the power to affect numerous people 2 in American and British society. The campaign for independent citizenship developed as part of a larger international women’s rights movement that had commenced in the seventeenth century in the United States and England. The lengthy and contentious campaign, waged by feminists in the twentieth century for the legal right of independent citizenship, garnered success because women reformers had been practicing protest for the last fifty to seventy-five years, for example in the Anti-Corn Law League in England, the equal education movement, the campaign to modify the civil codes so women would have more legal rights in their families, the anti-slavery movement, and the women’s suffrage movement. Immigration proved to be a powerful determinant of citizenship law in the United States and England.

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