28 Kristy A. Belton and Jamie Chai Yun Liew citizenship, as well as to confer citizenship on their children. Historically, women were seen as the property of male citizens. As a consequence, they often lost their birthright citizenship upon marriage to a noncitizen because they were assumed to have taken on the foreign husband’s citizenship. Although the 1957 Convention on the Nationality of Married Women prohibited this practice,12 gender discrimination in nationality laws remains a problem today. Twenty-seven countries deny mothers the equal right to confer nationality on their children and around fifty have other gender-discriminatory nationality provisions that place their female citizens on an unequal footing with their male counterparts. Women’s citizenship history and experience illustrate the property-like features of citizenship and underscore the patriarchal current that undergirds it. The Stateless Stateless people, or those who are not recognized under the operation of any state’s nationality law, typically are born and reside within a state that excludes them from citizenship. More than fifteen million people are estimated to be stateless globally. They suffer a host of human rights violations and impingements upon their ability to be self-determining agents because they are citizens of nowhere.13 Although multiple pathways to statelessness exist,14 no international norm exists recognizing a person’s right to be voluntarily stateless. In fact, international law is clear that each person should have a citizenship and that before a person is stripped of citizenship, she or he must have access to another state’s citizenship first. Even before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserted each person’s right to a nationality, the 1930 Convention on Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of Nationality Law established that it was “in the general interest of the international community to secure that all its members should recognize that every person should have a nationality.”15 Akin to the later 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, the 1930 Convention does not permit the loss of citizenship unless or until such time that a person acquires another one.16 Despite this, many states have resisted conferring citizenship on stateless persons, claiming they 12 Convention on the Nationality of Married Women, February 20, 1957, 309 U.N.T.S. 65, https://treaties.un.org/doc/Treaties/1958/08/19580811%2001-34%20AM/Ch_XVI_2p.pdf. 13 See K. A. Belton, Statelessness in the Caribbean: The Paradox of Belonging in a Postnational World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); K. A. Belton, “Statelessness: A Matter of Human Rights,” in R. Howard-Hassmann and M. Walton-Roberts (eds.), The Human Right to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 31–42. 14 See Belton, Statelessness in the Caribbean, pp. 30–38. 15 Convention on Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of Nationality Law, July 1, 1937, 179 L.N.T.S. 89. 16 Ibid., art. 7; Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, August 30, 1961, arts. 5–7. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press