Sir, In his letter in your issue of February 3, Mr Arthur Willey, M.P, draws attention to one aspect of the Cable Act, recently passed in the United States of America, which gives to a married woman the independent right to her own nationality and to naturalisation.
The letter makes it clear that a British woman who marries an American will not in future automatically acquire American nationality; and that, if she does not acquire it, British law will refuse to consider her as British, so that she will be without nationality.
I hope I do not misinterpret either Mr. Willey or the Foreign Office. Both, however, appear to assume that a British woman who marries an American would wish to give up British and acquire American nationality, which, incidentally, involves forswearing allegiance to the British Crown - surely a curious assumption for a Briton or a British Government Department. The facts point to the other direction. For years, practically all the nationally organised women's societies in the United Kingdom, and many in the Dominions, have been urging that the law should be amended so as to provide that the British woman should regain the right she lost in 1870 of retaining her nationality on marriage with an alien; and the Bill introduced last year by Sir John Burgher, which, inter alien, provided for this, was promoted by the National Council of Women, with the support of these other societies.
But the Cable Act also provides that, in future, an American woman who marries a foreigner shall not automatically lose her American nationality. She shall only lose it if she makes a formal renunciation of it. This means that an American woman who marries a British man shall be American by the law of the United States and British by British law. In the one case both countries claim her, in the other both renounce her.
This United States law is only another example of the trend of modern legislation in the direction of equal treatment for men and women. Its passage will certainly facilitate the progress of similar legislation in other countries, and, in particular, of Sir John Butcher's Bill, which will, no doubt, soon be introduced again, seeing that it passed its second reading without a division last year. Mr Willey's point is a useful illustration of the importance of making some international provision to prevent, as far as possible, new conflicts of law.
It is for this reason that the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, which stands for equalising as between men and women the laws of nationality in all countries, is going to discuss at its congress in Rome next May a Draft International Convention with a view to having the new legislation which will be required in most countries promoted on a coordinate plan.
