Immigrant Declarants and Loyal American Women: How Suffragists Helped Redefine the Rights of Citizens

Abstract

AbstractAs a result of the woman suffrage movement, citizenship and voting rights, though considered separate issues by the courts, became more intertwined in the mind of the average American. This interconnectedness was also a product of the concurrent movement to disfranchise immigrant declarant voters—immigrants who had filed their intention to become citizens but had not completed the naturalization process. This essay shows how suffragists pursued immigrant declarant disfranchisement as part of the woman suffrage movement, arguing that the same competitive political conditions that encouraged politicians to enfranchise primarily white, citizen women led them to disfranchise immigrant declarants. It analyzes suffragists’ arguments at both the state and national levels that voting was a right of citizens who had met their wartime obligations to the nation, and maintains that woman suffrage and the votes of white women who supported the measures disfranchising immigrant declarants and limiting immigrant rights should be included in historians’ understanding of the immigration restrictionist and nativist movements.