The gendering of legislative rationality: Women, immigrants, and the nationalization of citizenship, 1918--1922

This study traces the historical transformation of U.S. congressional approaches to citizenship and sovereignty, their effect on the U.S. state form, and their implications for feminist advocacy. Through the analysis of the congressional debates over the 19th Amendment of 1919, the Maternity and Infancy Act of 1921, and the Cable Act of 1922, I demonstrate that the state form functions through the textual constitution of populations in need of reform, particularly women, immigrants, and African Americans. In the 19th Amendment debates, arguments for women' enfranchisement worked in tandem with anti-immigrant and anti-alien suffrage sentiments to establish citizenship as a primary qualification for political participation. As the first federal piece of legislation aiming to provide maternal care, the Maternity-Infancy Act, also known as the Sheppard-Towner Act, advanced a discourse of protection, which inscribed into law the tropes of women's vulnerability and republican motherhood. With the Cable Act of 1922, which sought to disentangle women's nationality from the citizenship status of their husbands, the state supplanted the husband as the source of women's status. Without affecting the relational foundations of women's citizenship, the debates re-inscribed the constitutive connection between manhood and statehood.;Based on my analysis I argue, first, that legislative rationality---the forms and terms of rhetorical justification guiding congressional decision making and its outcome, positive law---gain adherence and legitimacy through articulations to natural order. Second, a closer look at the discursive production of women's "liberation" by the state does not sustain a historical narrative of women's inclusion into full U.S. citizenship. Third, the conjuncture between women's enfranchisement and immigrants' disenfranchisement facilitated the nationalization of politics and intensified the involvement of the federal government with matters of citizenship and general welfare. Fourth, citizenship is not just a domestic political category. The domestic containment of womanhood and the exchange value of women's citizenship became tools for the reconstitution of the international fraternal order of states after World War I. This study exposes the limits of feminist appeals to the state and calls for a critical analysis of the international regime of sovereignty as an expression of globalized conceptions of natural order.