Feminist Foresight in Statelessness produced by the Hague Conference. Yet, to his disappointment, the US cast the only dissenting vote against it, the other 40 countries voting in favour. Recalling these events three years after the fact, a frustrated Hudson wrote, ‘a persistent attack has been made on the Convention … in so far as it affects the nationality of women’. 67 Hudson believed that opposition to the Hague Convention by profeminist campaigners was based on misinterpretations of the effects of arts 8–11. 68 His main accusation was aimed at James Brown Scott, president of the American Institute of Law and an ally to the feminist cause. 69 Quoted in an article in the US Good Housekeeping magazine in 1931, Scott said: ‘Articles 8, 9, 10, and 11, setting forth a man’s view of the nationality of married women, are, as would be expected, based upon the principle of masculine superiority’. 70 The US dissenting vote was still a cause to rejoice for US feminists at the time. 71 Alva Belmont of the US National Women’s Party scoffed at the European signatories: These men have lost their slaves. They have lost their serfs. They have lost their dominion over the working class. They still think they can dominate women. It terrifies them to think that in the future women mean to govern themselves. 72 Hudson, on the other hand, believed that the US government had meekly succumbed to the feminist campaigners: [T]he Government of the United States is more intent upon mollifying a section of its own public opinion than upon grappling with the very real problems which exist today and which the convention is designed to solve. Apparently, the attitude of the United States is one of complete helplessness in the face of these problems. 73 Hudson acknowledged that articles in the Hague Convention were not based upon the principle of equality between men and women. But he simply dismissed the idea that equality could serve as a guide for international legislation that sought to resolve conflicts that arose from legal differences. 74 The work of feminists was not over. In succeeding years, governments were either frustrated or bemused by the continuing campaigns for the eradication of GDNL when statelessness, in their view, had been addressed by the Hague Convention. 75 During the League of Nations Council Meeting in January 1931, women from all over the world sent campaigning telegrams to Council members. British Foreign Minister Arthur Henderson, president of the Council at the time, received 210 telegrams in less than 48 hours, 150 of these from England. 76 As a result of the telegram campaign, and on the initiative of the representatives of Guatemala, Peru and Venezuela, the Council agreed to place the nationality of married women on the Assembly agenda. 77 Moreover, it invited eight transnational women’s organisations to form a committee within the Council of 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 Manley O Hudson, ‘The Hague Convention of 1930 and the Nationality of Women’ (1933) 27(1) American Journal of International Law 117, 117. ibid 121. Bredbenner (n 1) 204–5. O H P Belmont, ‘Are Women Really Citizens?’ (September 1931) Good Housekeeping 99, 132. Bredbenner (n 1) 213. ibid 215. Hudson (n 67) 122. ibid 121. Irving (n 7) 240. Miller (n 6) 227. Hudson (n 67) 118. 53