2020
Statelessness & Citizenship Review
2(1)
retained the idea that married women’s nationality was conditional. This, the
campaigners understood, implied inferior. 62 It is worth noting here that while
campaigners prioritised equality, choice, autonomy and in particular the
disestablishment of male marital authority, 63 they also recognised the risks of
proliferating childhood statelessness through GDNL. 64 International jurists at the
Hague Conference were in fact more open to preventing statelessness than they
were to engaging with feminist principles of equality, wanting to find solutions to
statelessness with ‘as little disruption as possible to male headship of marriage’. 65
Image 2: From Washington, National Women’s Party members telephone their colleague, Doris
Stevens, in The Hague to ascertain whether the World Code being drawn up on nationality laws will be
based on sex discrimination. 66
Manley O Hudson’s role in the feminist history of statelessness is once again
noteworthy. It appears for Hudson that the Hague Convention was a significant
achievement, if not least because it had been the only codification convention
62
63
64
65
66
Irving (n 7) 173.
DuBois (n 7) 207.
In 1934, Blanch Crozier noted:
There are already thirteen countries in the world in which men and women transmit
nationality to children upon the same terms (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Dominican
Republic, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Soviet Russia, Turkey,
Uruguay, Venezuela), and no greater difficulties have been encountered than in
countries where the father alone has the right to transmit nationality.
Crozier (n 7) 152.
DuBois (n 7) 207.
‘Media’, Picryl (Web Page) <https://picryl.com/media/feminists-telephone-the-hague-todetermine-their-status-in-proposed-world-code>.
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