This work is funded in part by the IEHS Digital History Seed Grant.
This project, like many others, began in quite unexpected ways. I was looking to correct a citation for a 1920 United States Federal Census record of my great grandmother that I was putting in a footnote on my master’s thesis. The intention was to discuss the discrepancy in the ways the United States Census recorded the education of Norwegian-American women in the decades after they attended school or completed higher education courses – she had been one to attend a business college while census records rarely made notation of it. It was then, as I confirmed no notation of any education, that I noticed an odd scribble on her record. An “X” was marked under immigration year, and an “al” w as placed under naturalization status. It seemed quite clear, indicated by evidence of another woman several lines above her with the same markings, that the census taker intended to mark these women “alien.”[1]
At first, I was confused; she had been born in rural Shelly, Minnesota in 1895. Why then, would they mark her an alien? I then remembered a conversation with my advisor, several weeks prior, about a policy that stripped women of their citizenship when they married a foreigner. I had never considered the policy could have affected my own family. Yet, after some extensive research, my evidence pointed me to the conclusion that my great grandmother had indeed been stripped of her U.S. citizenship when she married my great grandfather, a Norwegian immigrant, on January 3, 1918.[2] This would later be confirmed through her naturalization record and family testimony.
American women across the nation, like my great grandmother, were stripped of their U.S. citizenship throughout the twentieth century under the authority of the Expatriation Act of 1907. Passed during the height of mass immigration to the United States, the policy itself aimed to redefine the boundaries of American citizenship as new immigrants flooded into the nation. Caught in the cross-hairs of immigration restrictions were theseAmerican women who married unnaturalized immigrants. The act of marriage to a foreigner, according to policy supporters, signaled a lack of loyalty to the nation. As a result, congress punished these women by taking away their American citizenship but promised to assign these women the “nationality of her husband.”[3] Yet, while the act claimed to bestow upon these women, under a legacy of coverture, a new nationality; the act effectively rendered them stateless.
The 1922 Cable Act intended to correct this by granting married women an independent nationality. It was believed this new act would not only halt further expatriation but create a new path for women to recover their former status via a streamlined naturalization process, if they chose to do so. However, the racialized policies of naturalization barred some women from recovering such status, resulting in a battle for revisions throughout the 1930s by which all women could eventually recover their former citizenship. It also, for the first time, actually required women to go to the courts rather than allowing automatic resumption. While feminist and critical legal scholars have collectively brought critical attention to the intimate connections between gender, race, and sexuality evident in these policies, very little is known about the women whose citizenship was taken or those who tried to recover it.[4]
Citizenship Taken is thus an ongoing and unreleased relational database that illuminates the identities and stories of women whose citizenship was taken, like that of my great grandmother, by virtue of the 1907 Expatriation Act and those who sought to recover their status throughout the twentieth century. It, however, does not seek to be comprehensive of all expatriated women, for reasons stated explicitly and implicitly below. It, instead, aims to recover the identities and stories of the American-born women living on the Northern Great Plains.
The identities and stories of these American-born women are constructed from two popular but misrepresented sources; the 1920 United States Federal Census and women’s naturalization records. These women, like my great grandmother, will be marked in the 1920 census with an “X” and “al” under immigration and naturalization respectively. As American-born women, they will have a birthplace listed in the United States. Immigrant women, who naturalized independently prior to marriage, on the other hand will not contain the same markings, and instead, appear as any other immigrant. This, however, does not mean they are impossible to trace.
As a result of the 1922 Cable Act, these women were required to undergo naturalization to recover their U.S. citizenship, regardless of if they had done so prior or had been born on American soil. In their naturalization, and later repatriation, records an annotation will be made somewhere on the form to indicate their intention behind the process of naturalization. That annotation will note they are exempt from filing a declaration of intention and that they seek the benefits of the September 22,1922 act (aka the Cable Act). This annotation appears for both the American-born women and immigrant women expatriated by the 1907 policy. However, one must be careful in surveying these records, for this annotation also applies to women who temporarily left the U.S. and were also stripped of citizenship.
The reason for the surveys of these records comes from the understanding, briefly stated above, that we do not who these women are; there exists no master list. These women, despite the popularity of these sources, remain a missing and invisible dataset. While these sources are popular, they often sit behind various paywalls set up by repositories and online genealogical resources like Ancestry.com. Additionally, despite efforts to digitize these records – naturalization records in particular – most digital indexes do not account for American-born individuals. Such individuals, without the knowledge of the policy and how it affected American women, might be relegated to a mistake in naturalization collections. As a result, they are often excluded from these indexes, requiring an individual to search the entire collection for their record. Thus, despite important efforts to digitize and make these sources available, those efforts often reproduce a silencing of married women, both historically and archivally.
While his project maintains that it is simply not enough to acknowledge this as a problem, it does not seek to “solve” this problem or correct archival and digitization practices. Instead, it aims to demonstrate, through these surveys, that complete knowledge of policy comes not from the debates about the policy alone, but how it operated on-the-ground. It also aims to break our understanding about immigration, naturalization, and American citizenship, as well as race, class, and gender by sharing the stories of these American-born women. With intentions to focus these surveys on Midwestern states, it also aims to break myths about birthright citizenship in this region and the relationship the American heartland has to immigration policy and border policing. The Midwest was not, and is not, isolated from immigration and naturalization policies; nor are American-born individuals left unaffected by the policies placed on immigration and naturalization.
While this is an ongoing project, still in early stages of development, in the state of Nebraska alone and estimated 9,000 American-born women were stripped of their citizenship by the 1907 policy. Their stories are already yielding important insights into the policy and its impact on ordinary individuals. Take, for example, the life of Annie “Anna” Zadina Napravnick Ishii. Anna Ishii was born in South Omaha, Nebraska, on August 2, 1889, to working-class Bohemian immigrants John and Mary Zadina. Born on American soil, Ishii was guaranteed birthright citizenship; at least, until her marriage to Bohemian immigrant, Peter Napravnick, in 1910. When her husband tragically died by the railroad in 1915, her American citizenship was automatically resumed, but only for a short time. When she married Japanese immigrant, James Ishii, in 1919, her U.S. citizenship was stripped for the second time. She would spend nearly two decades waiting to recover it yet again. You can learn more about Anna Ishii’s story in my article “Beyond Vows: Race, Marriage, and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Omaha,” published in the Spring 2025 issue of the Nebraska History Magazine, or watch the full lecture given for the Nebraska State History Society’s Lunchbox Lecture series online through LNK-TV or YouTube.[5]
What becomes increasingly clear through these surveys on the stories uncovered is the many ways these women challenged ideas about identity and American citizenship. To suggest the identities and stories of these women do not matter is to continue the practice of silencing the voices of women, especially those from racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds, as they struggled against a nation closing its borders and as they helped redefine what it meant to hold American citizenship.
You can follow the progress of this project on Instagram @citizenshiptaken or connect with the project directly at citizenshiptaken@gmail.com.
[1] 1920 United States Federal Census, 1920, Microfilm, Roll T625_848, Shelly, Norman County, Minnesota, 2B, Ancestry.com.
[2] Marriage, Emil Swenson and Bertha Efteland, January 3, 1918, p. 50, Zion Lutheran Ministerial Records, 1880-1908, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Church Records, 1781-1969, Ancestry.com
[3] Public, No. 193 An Act in Reference to the expatriation of citizens and their protection abroad, 34 Stat. 1228.
[4] For examples of scholarship that specifically focuses on the racialized motivations of the policies, see Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Ann Marie Nicolosi, “‘We Do Not Want Our Girls to Marry Foreigners’: Gender, Race, and American Citizenship,” NWSA Journal 13, no. 3 (2001), 1-21; Gretchen Ritter, The Constitution as Social Design: Gender and Civic Membership in the American Constitutional Order (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Martha Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870-1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Rebecca DeWolf, Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920 1963 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021). For a broader discussion on racial exclusion in naturalization policy, see Patrick Weil, The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), and Ben Herzog, Revoking Citizenship: Expatriation in America from the Colonial Era to the War on Terror (New York: New York University Press, 2015).
[5] Brianna Rose DeValk,“Beyond Vows: Race, Marriage, and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Omaha,” Nebraska History Magazine vol 106, no. 1 (Spring 2025): 14-27.