relieve himself of the responsibility and necessity of deciding a question for himself. He would do well to peruse 3 F (2D) Pg. 691, in re Linklater, where he will discover, perhaps for the first time, that the examiner has no judicial powers whatever, is an administrative officer only, and is wholly without power to prevent any person from filing a petition for naturalization.

The reforms recommended in the Commissioner's annual report cause us to throw up our hands in despair, for here again we find projected plans for a sort of Russian passport system, dominant under the Czar, an annual registration scheme to be handsomely paid for by the alien, a proposal to treble naturalization fees and charge each of the children of naturalized parents ten dollars for a certificate, and an unusual recommendation to clothe the examiner with judicial authority and legislate into him scientific qualifications for the administration of an educational test.

The responsibility for the perplexing conditions of the hour may be traced directly to the effects of recent rulings emanating from the Department of Labor at Washington. An immediate revocation of every one of them would work a marvelous reformation, without awaiting the action of Congress or the courts, institutions somewhat aptly described, by a former Denver naturalization examiner, "for purposes of immediate relief, as remote as God." But in the midst of it all, the Commissioner, with a far-off look toward Congress, cries out for a new law, and the bewildered applicant, with his eyes fixed on the Commissioner humbly and respectfully asks for a new deal.

THE EFFECT OF THE CABLE LAW ON THE CITIZENSHIP
STATUS OF FOREIGN WOMEN

Josephine Roche, Former Director, Foreign Language Information
Service, New York

Those of us who are concerned over certain unfortunate consequences of the Cable law are not opposing the principle of independent citizenship for married women, which it is the purpose of the law to establish. The objections to a system which commits a woman to allegiance to a country and to the responsibilities of citizenship solely through the oath of her husband are too obvious to need discussion. When, however, we begin carefully to look into all aspects of the situation which the law's operation creates, we realize that a theoretical equality without provision for the practical needs of the day has been set up, so that actually a large group of women, already the most handicapped and harassed among us, are being subjected to further denials and problems, instead of participating in a freer and juster state of affairs.

The law, which went into effect September 22, 1922, provides that an alien woman who has married a citizen, or whose husband has been naturalized since

the law passed, remains an alien until she is naturalized separately. She must comply with all requirements of the naturalization law, except that she need not make a declaration of intention, and needs only a year of residence in the United States. An alien woman married either before or after September 22, 1922, may be naturalized even though her husband remains an alien, but she must meet the regular naturalization requirements, including the five years residence and making a declaration of intention. A woman who lost her American citizenship by marriage before the Cable law may regain it through the usual naturalization proceedings, except that she need not make a declaration and needs to have lived in the United States only one year. An American woman married to an alien since this law passed does not lose her American citizenship unless she formally renounces it. No woman-native or foreign-born-can be a citizen while married to an alien ineligible to citizenship. Single women are not affected by the law. It is with the first two of these groups-those of the alien married women-that we are concerned.

The alien woman, married either before or after the passage of the act to an alien eligible to citizenship, may now acquire for herself the citizenship which she may have wanted and needed in the past, but been denied because her husband had deserted her, or because he was too delinquent, or indifferent, to take out papers. Every immigrant aid organization can tell of one or more such women who have undergone hardships under the old law. For these women the Cable law will bring relief and release. But important as their case is, they are the exception rather than the rule. Most families want the same citizenship.

When we turn to the group of alien women married, since the passage of the law, to American citizens, or whose husbands have become citizens since that date, the serious phases of the situation become apparent.

Women without a country.-The first difficulty experienced under the Cable law by many of these women was their loss of all citizenship status. A summary of the citizenship laws of foreign countries made by the Foreign Language Information Service shows that the women of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Jugoslavia, Norway, Sweden, and of certain other countries, lose their citizenship by marriage to an alien. A German woman, married to a German, may keep her citizenship if he changes his.

Five countries-Denmark, France, Italy, Poland, and Switzerland-definitely provide that their women nationals continue their citizenship after marriage with an alien, unless such marriage automatically confers the citizenship of the husband upon the wife. Lithuania provides that the marriage of a Lithuanian woman to anyone but an American means forfeiting her citizenship. but she remains a Lithuanian citizen if her husband is an American.

Thus, a woman from the first-mentioned group of countries is a woman without a country-America does not admit her with her husband into citizenship, and her fatherland no longer claims her because of his citizenship here. She has no place to turn for the protection and assistance which nearly everyone

needs at some time from his country. Her status first came to attention because of passport complications which followed the passage of the Cable law. When she and her American-citizen husband were about to start on the long-planned and hoped-for trip to the old home in Europe they found that although he had no trouble in getting his United States passport, it didn't include her—and she couldn't get one anywhere else. So the journey had to be given up, or taken by the husband alone, while the wife puzzled over the strangeness of it all and told her neighbors how "the American government, it took away my citizenship, and didn't give me another one."

However, certain of these countries are making, or have made, special provision to meet the needs of travel. Austria and Hungary authorize their consular representatives to issue passports, under certain conditions, to these women; Austrian women have to obtain certain documents from the officer of the district from which they originally immigrated. Hungarian women must prove they were born in the present political territory of Hungary. Czechoslovakia, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Jugoslavia, Norway, and Sweden recognize some sort of unofficial travel papers for these women-"certificates of nationality," or of "identity," or "pass certificates." If a German woman's husband is a naturalized American of German birth she can have a German passport.

For entrance into the United States, American consuls have been instructed to accept and visé in their discretion the personal affidavit of these women. Such informal papers as these, issued for travel to Europe or to the United States, do not entitle the holder to the protection of any government, nor do they guarantee that other countries will recognize them, unless the consular representatives of said countries have already placed their visé on the document.

Alien wives of citizens not deportable. The anxiety felt over the possibility that alien wives of citizens might be subject to deportation during their first five years here was somewhat relieved by a decision on this subject given by Judge Brown, of the district court of Rhode Island. In the Dorto case he ruled that the alien wives of citizen husbands are not deportable unless they are barred from citizenship by race, or are in the group covered by Proviso 1, Section 19, Immigration Act of 1917, emphasizing in his decision the point that Congress, in conferring the non-quota status on the alien wife of an American citizen in the Immigration Act of 1924, has recognized the importance of the marriage relation.

Legal discriminations to which alien wives are subject.—We have had our interest in citizenship so long and so intensely focused on the voting privilege it confers that we have let slip into the background of our thoughts its other benefits. Yet laws on a number of vital matters-such as land ownership, public employment, and public aid to keep children in their own homes-are influenced by the factor of citizenship. Thus, in certain states aliens cannot own land; mothers' pension laws of six states require that the mothers of the children

aided be citizens, and three others, that she shall have declared her intention or filed her application.

Complication in family relations.-Those who have known immigrant families feel that another phase of the situation-one which may be called the psychological effect of the law on the family relationship-presents complications. Of all the members of the immigrant family, the mother remains most untouched by American influences. The father gets out into the factory and shop, the children are absorbed into the life of the schools and the streets, but the mother lives at home with her old-world memories crowding always into her thoughts, and old-world customs clinging to her in all that she does. Now she finds herself still further "alienated" from her household; her husband, sons, and daughters all enter the ranks of American citizens on the day father brings home his certificate. But she is barred out, and she asks in bewilderment, as a Jugoslav woman did in a letter to the Foreign Language Information Service, "Does not a wife belong to her husband, and a mother to her children?"-A most regrettable lack of independence of spirit, of feeling for the rights of her sex, perhaps, but the expression of a very real and general point of view which we cannot afford to ignore.

The answer which is always being made to this recital of the immigrant woman's recently added troubles is the obvious one. "Let her get her citizenship; the men do it, and she's on the same basis with them now." If she really were on a basis of equal opportunity with them, there would be little comeback, but in assuring her the right to independent citizenship we have by no means equalized her chance with theirs, so that the gaining of the right seems to many mothers a doubtful blessing in comparison with the practical advantages they have lost.

We have scarcely made a beginning in providing opportunities for the education of immigrant men, but even such meager chances as exist for them are not equally chances for their wives. They cannot attend the night school, the factory class, the distant club, which take them away from their house and children. The 1920 census reports that of the twelve and a half million foreignborn whites twenty-one years of age and over, 36,840 were attending school, less than one-third of whom were women. A 1925 bulletin of the United States Naturalization Bureau on Citizenship Training of Adult Immigrants states that there were three times as many men as women in the group of 46,846 for whom age and sex was reported, out of the quarter of a million enrolled in citizenship classes during 1922-23.

The brightest spot in the record of educational work for immigrant women is the period just following their enfranchisement, when the so-called "danger" of their "ignorant" vote was thought to be imminent. Then only was there anything approaching a general interest in providing the kind of classes they need.

Those who argue that the new troubles of the immigrant woman will be an incentive to her to become naturalized must have reached this opinion in a

pleasant study, far removed from the tenement homes of immigrants. When one is undergoing daily trials and bewilderments, struggling with the neverunderstood regulations and laws of a new land, as the immigrant mother is doing, she is not apt to seek the further burden of classes, examinations, and appearances in court. It has, indeed, been suggested by those closely in touch with immigrant groups that the fact that his citizenship does not extend to his wife may deter many immigrant men from taking out papers. There are no statistics by which this can be substantiated; it is based on a realization of the very great solidarity of newly arrived families, and upon the fact that one of the chief motives in a man's taking out his papers formerly was that his wife and children benefited.

No certain prophecy, however, can be made as yet about what will happen under the Cable law; we do not even know, for the two-and-a-half-year period it has been operating, the number of alien women who have taken independent action for citizenship. The naturalization figures do not classify separately the papers issued to native and foreign-born women, so that when we read that during 1924, 14,716 women received certificates, we do not know how many of these were native Americans regaining citizenship, how many were single women, and how many were alien wives of citizens.

Possibly the special provision cutting down to one year the necessary period of residence for alien wives of citizens and making unnecessary the declaration of intention will be a help, although the ninety-day period following the application scarcely seems sufficient time for them to prepare themselves for the final examination, when we think of how difficult it is for men to be ready through the efforts they put forth during the period. The provisions are chiefly important, it seems to me, in their admission of the need of special equalizing factors in the situation.

Our citizenship requirements for men are at best but a compromise between what we would like them to be, ideally, and what is possible under given conditions, but we are apt to think of them as we do of all human institutions of our day, as fixed and established, instead of as the eternally tentative and changing things they are. Whether the best interests of the country are to be served by keeping out of citizenship a large number of persons who cannot meet the requirements of the moment remains to be seen. We know from repeated lessons of history that the interests of the uneducated and underprivileged have never been safe in the hands of the educated and privileged. Ignorance and social inadequacies have usually been the result of denial of opportunity, and usually have been penalized by further denials.

To prevent such a further penalization of large numbers of immigrant women is our task. Either further special methods of admitting them to citizenship must be adopted, or adequate provision of opportunities must be made which will meet their needs as a group-not merely those of a few individuals here and there and prepare them for the present requirements.