Citizenship Alienage and the Modern Constitutional State

To have a nationality is a human right. But between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries virtually every country in the world adopted laws that stripped citizenship from women who married foreign men. Despite the resulting hardships and even statelessness experienced by married women it took until 1957 for the international community to condemn the practice with the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Nationality of Married Women. Citizenship Alienage and the Modern Constitutional State tells the important yet neglected story of marital denaturalization from a comparative perspective. Examining denaturalization laws and their impact on women around the world with a focus on Australia Britain Canada Ireland New Zealand and the United States it advances a concept of citizenship as profoundly personal and existential. In doing so it sheds light on both a specific chapter of legal history and the theory of citizenship in general.