2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review I 2(1) INTRODUCTION On 13 March 1930, feminist activists from around the world descended on The Hague to protest a gathering of the League of Nations. Not invited to the opening ceremonies of the conference, the activists held a protest rally a few doors away. Gaining plenty of attention by the press, they were dressed colourfully, using their clothes to represent the countries they came from and the restricted women’s rights that existed there. White clothes stood for complete equality, while pink and blue etc signified a change in law toward equality. Black, worn by the hosting Dutch feminists, meant complete discrimination in the law. While this lively event sounds like the actions of suffragettes of that period, the discriminatory laws these women were protesting were in fact nationality laws. In 1930, nationality laws in all but five countries in the world made distinctions based on sex, specifically discriminating against women by making their nationality dependent on that of their husbands. 1 In 2020, there remains roughly 50 countries in the world that continue to discriminate against women in regard to their nationality. 2 The launch of the Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights in 2014, to work toward the full eradication of gender discriminatory nationality laws (‘GDNL’) was very welcome, particularly to those working on ending statelessness. 3 Statelessness is a real consequence of GDNL for millions of children born to mothers in those 25 countries where women do not have the same right as men to pass on their nationality. 4 However, what this article reveals — possibly for the first time to many working on statelessness today — is that women’s citizenship equality campaigns are not new. So highly regarded, and prominent, was the importance of women’s nationality rights during the early 1900s, that the newly formed International Woman Suffrage Alliance was renamed the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship (the ‘Alliance’). 5 Also, in notable similarity to today’s Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights, the protests of the 1930s have been referred to as ‘the campaign for equal nationality rights’. 6 Once pulled, this thread of early twentieth century GDNL campaigning reveals an abundance of literature written on these 1 2 3 4 5 6 The five countries were Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and the Soviet Union: see Candice Lewis Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own: Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship (University of California Press 1998) 195 n 1. For a full list of the countries and other information relating to gender discriminatory nationality laws: see ‘The Problem’, Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights (Web Page) <https://equalnationalityrights.org/the-issue/the-problem> (‘The Problem’). As will be detailed later, there have been several variations of gender discriminatory nationality laws (‘GDNL’) over the past century, some have been almost fully eradicated, and others not. In this article, GDNL is used as an umbrella term for each form of nationality law that discriminates against women. Cf Lina Abou-Habib, ‘Gender, Citizenship, and Nationality in the Arab Region’ (2003) 11(3) Gender and Development 66, 67; Zahra Albarazi, ‘No Legal Bond, No Family Life’ (2014) 19(1–2) Tilburg Law Review 11, 12; Zahra Albarazi, Deirdre Brennan and Laura van Waas, ‘Gender Discrimination in Nationality Laws: Human Rights Pathways to Gender Neutrality’ in Niamh Reilly (ed), International Human Rights of Women (Springer 2019) 193, 196. Bredbenner (n 1) 203. Carol Miller, ‘“Geneva — the Key to Equality”: Inter-War Feminists and the League of Nations’ (1994) 3(2) Women’s History Review 219, 226. 44