WOMAN'S NATIONALITY

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 125, 29 May 1930, Page 9

WOMAN'S NATIONALITY

THE MARITAL TIE

AMERICA BREAKING THROUGH

(From "The Post's" Representative.) . NEW YORK, Ist May.

Coinciding with the world-wide dernaud by women for equality with men—an issue keenly. debated before The Hague Conference last month—the House of Representatives at Washington is considering the restoratioa of nationality to American women who have lost their citizenship hy marriage to foreigners.

The issue, has been more or less a live one for half a century. The daughter of President Grant lost her citizenship in 1874 when she married a British subject; at his death it required a resolution of Congress to restore it. The defect in the law, exposed by her case, was corrected in 1907 by an amendment, providing that an American woman might, when her marital status was terminated by death Or divorce, resume her citizenship by registering, at a United States Consulate or returning to reside in America. In the ease of women who married non-Americana and continued to reside in America, they took the nationality of their husbands, although they may never have left their own native country. In one such case, the highest tribunal, the United States Supreme Court, refused the applicant the right to vote, but the decision did much to direct public attention to the unfair discrimination against American women in the Act of 1907. They lost, by their marriage, protection by the United States Government while abroad, all right of suffrage, of holding- office, either by election or appointment, the ■right to participate in Governmental affairs, and, in many States, 'tho right to hold or inherit property, to teach in" the public schools, practise law or medicine, or to carry on many of the other vocations of life. EQUAL CITIZENSHIP. This marked the beginning of an earnest battle'for equal citizenship rights .with men. In 1022, American women won the right of nationality, independent of that of her husband. By a law of Congress passed'in that year, marriage to an alien no longer deprived them of American citizenship. Nevertheless, although the 1922 law was a great moral victory, women who married before that year were under a handicap. By the terras of the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, women who' lost citizenship by marriage prior to 1922 could not re-enter the country except on the quota of their husband's nationality. They might have to wait for years for an allotment under the quota.' Mrs. Ruth Bryan Owen, member of the House of. Representatives, who married a British Army officer in 1910, had to go through the same naturalisation proceedings as an alien. These defects of the 1922 law are now before Congress in a Bill to permit such women to re-enter the United States, or to resume their citizenship if they never left the country, as a non-quota immigrant, such as a Canadian or Mexican. The length and character of residence will not affect their rights. In effect, the Bill will give' women equal citizenship rights with. men. Yet there can never be full equality until the many different nationality laws of the world are made more uniform. It is on this task The Hague Conference is now engaged.