2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2(1) the League of Nations. 78 The committee’s proposals would be presented to the Twelfth Assembly in 1931. 79 The new committee, entitled the Women’s Consultative Committee on Nationality (the ‘Committee’) brought forward proposals opposing the Hague Convention because ‘it differentiates between men and women as regards nationality’. 80 Instead, the Committee insisted that each state party should agree that ‘there shall be no distinction based on sex in their law and practice relating to nationality’. 81 In counterpoint to the Hague Convention, the Committee emphasised how women were ‘deeply concerned to see that articles predicated on the theory of women’s subordination have been included in an international agreement’. 82 They maintained that recognising the ‘old idea’ of subordination in practice was to ‘refuse [women] adult status’. 83 The Convention on the Nationality of Women 1933 One of the major achievements of the 1920–30s period was that, following years of advocacy and research by the Inter-American Commission of Women, an equal-nationality treaty was on the agenda of the 1933 Pan American Union Conference. Out of this Conference came the adoption of the world’s first international convention relating to women’s nationality rights, or to women’s rights of any kind, the Convention on the Nationality of Women. Article 1 specified that signatories agreed that ‘[t]here shall be no distinction based on sex as regards nationality, in their legislation or in their practice’. 84 The Ferocity of the Feminist Cause It will be necessary in due course to examine the gradual disintegration of the international-level citizenship campaigns, but in order to illustrate the full extent of the campaigners’ influence throughout the 1920s and ’30s, it is instructive to home in on a specific national case. Irish historian Mary Daly has examined the dynamics between the newly emerging Irish Free State and the citizenship equality campaigners. 85 This is a case that neatly demonstrates the integrated role of international pressure, religious influence and political will in overcoming GDNL, factors that may impact on campaigning work today. In 1926, when the Irish Free State was only four years old and still a British Dominion, the Irish Secretary of State, Kevin O’Higgins, speaking at an Imperial Conference for Dominions of the Empire of London (the ‘Imperial Conference’), dismissed Ireland’s need to eradicate GDNL. O’Higgins reasoned that ‘there is not in the Irish Free State the same pressure from feminist movements, which … exists in Great Britain’. 86 At the Imperial Conference, only South Africa and Ireland 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 Miller (n 6) 227. Hudson (n 67) 118. ibid. ibid. Guerry (n 7) 85. ibid. Convention on the Nationality of Women, opened for signature 26 December 1933, Pan American Union (entered into force 29 August 1934) art 1. Daly (n 7). ibid 249. 54