Citizenship, Alienage, and the Modern Constitutional State: A Gendered History

Abstract

"To have a nationality is a human right. But between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, virtually every country in the world adopted laws that stripped citizenship from women who married foreign men. Despite the resulting hardships and even statelessness experienced by married women, it took until 1957 for the international community to condemn the practice, with the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Nationality of Married Women. Citizenship, Alienage, and the Modern Constitutional State tells the important yet neglected story of marital denaturalization from a comparative perspective. Examining denaturalization laws and their impact on women around the world, with a focus on Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States, it advances a concept of citizenship as profoundly personal and existential. In doing so, it sheds light on both a specific chapter of legal history and the theory of citizenship in general. There was a time, not so long ago, when marriage turned women into aliens in their own country. For the simple act of marrying a foreign man their citizenship was stripped from them. Often it was replaced with another, although sometimes with none at all. This history is little known, and the laws that performed its strange alchemy are even less understood. The story's end lies in the United Nations Convention on the Nationality of Married Women. The Convention, adopted in 1957 and entered into force in 1958, is, undeniably, one of the lesser known of the international rights-bearing treaties, overshadowed by the mighty UN Conventions that were ratified in the following decades, giving expression to the rights of disadvantaged groups and peoples, including women. Yet, in its day, the 1957 Convention was a great milestone in the protection of rights. It addressed a century-old (or older) practice that had caused hardship in the lives of countless individuals and"...

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