Book Review: A Nationality of Her Own
| Author | Michael Freeman |
| Date | 01 September 1999 |
| Published date | 01 September 1999 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399900800312 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Sabbah, Fatna A. (1984) Women in the Muslim Unconscious. Oxford: Pergamon
Press.
HALEH AFSHAR
Department of Politics, University of York, UK
CANDICE LEWIS BREDBENNER, A Nationality of Her Own. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998, xi + 294pp., $45.00 (cloth).
It was Michael Sandel (1982) who said that the family was ‘beyond justice’. The roots
of this view go deep (Aristotle was the first to distinguish public and private realms:
in the latter, the oikos, women could achieve only the limited goodness of the nat-
urally ruled) but, as Pateman (1988) has shown, its modern political meaning is to be
traced to Locke. The social contract to make civil society and the state could not have
come into being without a sexual contract which subordinates women in marriage.
As Wendy Brown (1995) explains, ‘the sexual contract is where patriarchalism livesin
the political and legal order ordinarily understood as its supersession’. Pateman’s
thesis of the relocation of patriarchalism from the political to the private domain is
supported in Bredbenner’s history of women, marriage and the law of citizenship in
the United States.
With so much discussion of the public/private divide (Boyd, 1997; Freeman, 1985;
Gavison, 1992; O’Donovan, 1985; Olsen, 1983), it is refreshing to come across a study
which, while seemingly oblivious to these debates, offers such an interesting contri-
bution to the dynamics of this intersection (see also Kerber, 1988). It is easy to see
marriage as quintessentially the private institution but it is, of course, a public insti-
tution, a means of social ordering, an instrument of gender ordering (and in the United
States also of racial ordering, which subject Bredbenner also discusses in relation to
Chinese and other ‘Asiatic’ marriages). Bredbenner demonstrates the close relation-
ship between citizenship and marital status. It is thus another study of the ways in
which the ‘private’ is manipulated by the ‘public’. In the early days of the
public–private discussion, the assumption within feminist activism was that public
intervention into private lives acted to protect the weak against the powerful. Now
this is being questioned more and more (see, for example, Morley and Mullender,
1992, in relation to domestic violence). When the ‘public’ regulates, it can do so in a
discriminatory way. Intervention can be either benign or intrusive, depending on per-
spective (compare the different responses to laws to curb female genital mutilation:
see Slack, 1988; cf. Sheldon and Wilkinson, 1998). There are numerous studies of the
discriminatory ways in which public intervention operations (a number are found in
Boyd, 1997).
Bredbenner’s study can now be added to this list. She charts the making and un-
making of two pieces of legislative intervention into the private, and discusses their
aftermath. In 1855 (following a United Kingdom precedent of 1844, which has not been
subject to a similar study) the US passed legislation which bestowed American citizen-
ship on foreign women – with certain discriminatory exceptions – who married Ameri-
can men. Needless to say, marriage to an American woman did not confer this ‘benefit’
on foreign men. Consent to marriage was thus construed as an act of political consent.
In reality there was no consent, rather coercion, though, as Bredbenner describes it, the
women concerned were involved in ‘ “voluntary” acts of wifely devotion’ (p. 22). There
is irony too because, as she writes, coverture had begun ‘its slow and fitful demise’ (p.
19) and this legislation amplified it. But it is irony which can be readily explained, as
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