How my great-grandmother lost her U.S. citizenship the year women got the right to vote
By Jayne Orenstein
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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/08/13/expatriation-act-citizenship-women-suffrage/
