Melissa, Introduction

Melissa Diaz

History 209S

9 February 2016

On January 22, 1913, Ethel Mackenzie, a wealthy suffragist, applied to be registered as a voter in San Francisco, California. Although California extended suffrage to women in 1911, officials told Ethel Mackenzie that she was ineligible to register because she was no longer an American citizen. Ethel had unknowingly lost her American citizenship and become a British subject due to her marriage to Scottish opera singer Gordon Mackenzie. Under Section 3 of the Expatriation Act of 1907, Congress declared that “any American woman who marries a foreigner will take the nationality of her husband.” In 1855 Congress first linked marriage to citizenship when it approved derivative citizenship for foreign women in the name of “family unity.”  In a way, citizenship for foreign wives was the extension of coverture to citizenship status, but before 1907 Congress did not mention any extension of citizenship in the case of an American wife and a foreign born husband. Like many other women, Ethel Mackenzie challenged the Expatriation Act of 1907, and, owing to her status and privilege, brought her case to the Supreme Court. The Court, however, upheld the act claiming that it was necessary to “merge identities and give dominance to the husband.”

In 1909 Gladys Emery married Gunfire Aoki in San Francisco, and although she and her five children were born on American soil, she also lost her American citizenship.  The Cable Act, which repealed the Expatriation Act in part, only applied to women whose husbands were eligible for naturalization. Because Aoki’s Japanese heritage prevented him from being eligible for citizenship, Gladys Emery was unable to regain citizenship until her husband’s death in 1933. The legislation on married women’s citizenship had distinct effects on Ethel Mackenzie and Gladys Emery based on their class and the nationality of their husbands. This paper will examine the motivations of Congress’ actions, and the effects of this legislation in the context of the changing ideas about race and the role of women in society. Congress passed this legislation during the Progressive Era, which was both a time of rampant nativism and fear of race mixing, and an era of women’s movements. Both the Expatriation Act of 1907 and the Cable Act of 1922 allowed patriarchs to maintain control of American family structure and enforce the boundaries of racial hierarchies in a changing world.