My great-grandmother, Ida Brown, was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1898. She was a U.S. citizen until she married my great-grandfather, a Russian immigrant, in 1920, and then she wasn’t.
Like many American-born women who married immigrants in the early 20th century, my great-grandmother assumed the citizenship of her husband under the Expatriation Act of 1907. And like many American-born women who lost their citizenship — thousands of them — she had absolutely no idea.
“You think [of] being a citizen as this very, very fundamental right, that if it were being taken away, that somebody would at least notify you of that fact,” said Felice Batlan, a professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law at Illinois Institute of Technology who specializes in women’s legal history. “Most women did not know that they had had their citizenship taken away until something happened if they suddenly needed it.”
My great-grandmother, Ida, found out when she applied to be a witness for her husband’s naturalization in 1922. “When he applied to be a citizen, she said she was going to be a witness. He had to have a witness. And they said, ‘You can’t be. You’re not a citizen,’ ” my grandmother, Madeline Winsten, recounted.
For decades, the law stripped women of their rights — the ability to leave the country and be allowed back in, the ability to claim “mother’s pensions” and Social Security, to apply for jobs with New Deal programs, and as women gained suffrage, the ability to vote in some states.
Ethel Mackenzie was born in California and married a Scottish immigrant in 1909. When California granted women suffrage in 1911, she was denied the right to vote based on her citizenship status. She challenged the Expatriation Act before the Supreme Court, claiming it stripped her of her 14th Amendment rights, but the court upheld the law in the 1915 case, Mackenzie v. Hare.
“If we’re looking to the Supreme Court to protect women’s rights at all during this period, the Supreme Court refuses to do that,” Batlan said. So it was up to lawmakers to change how women kept their citizenship. With the ratification of the 19th amendment, women’s groups had more political power. They were able to lobby Congress and propose legislation.