In the public sphere the nationality of the female immigrants usually binds with marriage and husband both refer to the ‘identity politics’ in modern political science.
The identifying of immigrants may adopt the method of historiography as Swift has done the research on Irish identity in Victorian British (Swift, 2009). The diasporic studies are also the new trends of studying ethnic immigrants (O’Day, 2009).
Marriage is a normative form of human institutionalization which mainly presents the important parts of public sphere within the discourse of Habermas grounded in the roots of Max Weber and Hegelian-Marxists traditions. The Weberian tradition traces its roots back to the Kantian’s discourse where the Western rationality prevails.
The debates on the public sphere whether lies only in democratic polity remains implicit in this article. The quality of discourse and quantity of political participation critically demand some basic elements of democracy in political science.
For centuries, the nationality of female immigrants depends on their husbands.
Women would loose their native born nationality if they marry foreigners in many countries. The marital expatriation has been common consequence of citizenship while women marry to aliens. Why does the transnational marriage result of abandoning the nationality? Is it an authentic outcome from male dominated both in political and social jurisdiction? Let’s take American as an example. She is one of the old democratic regimes. Even early in 1904 of the States, the Woman’s Journal carried the titles of ‘Warning to American Heiresses’ to think of the result of abandoning the freedom, citizenship and some other important values of democratic social and political life if wed to foreigners. The Expatriation Act of 1907 in the States blocked the efforts from some feminist movements, such as the members of The Daughters of the American Revolution, in protecting the restoration of women’s nationality rights to fight against the regulation of native-born American women marring to aliens. However, the awareness of equal nationalities both to native-born women who married foreigners and foreign women married American men was raised by Ellen Spencer Mussey, the founder of the Washington College of
Law and the writer of the Rankin bill. Some countries those who were expatriated citizen women because of their foreign marriages, including Great Britain, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherland, New Zealand, South Africa and France, were considering legislative action similar to the Rankin bill.
The assimilation and discrimination have been hypothesized and observed by social psychologist to understand if the ethnicity serves as the factors or bias in the process for the individuals or groups adjusting their behaviors to suit the lager society (Foroutan, 2008). That is a rocky road to adapt into the immigrant society for any ethnic groups (Kolig, 2008). Modernity could be understood on the institutional level.For Habermas is an essentially bourgeois entity, the concept of his public sphere is based on 1) the notion of public good as distinct from private interest; 2) social institutions, like private property, to empower individuals to participate independently in political and social affairs; 3) the forms of private life that prepares individuals to act as autonomous, rational-critical subject (Calhoun, 1992).
Besides the gender, the race, culture, class, and disability are the primary cause of women’s oppression. For example, white women have higher social statue than the black women. The women in upper class have more opportunity than the women in lower class. Aboriginal women may receive less social resources than the women in the metropolitan. Women’s strength not only varies with economic conditions but also with the re-structuring of public and private spheres and sectors and with their own organizing strategies. Antonio Gramsci is careful not to reduce civil society to the economy and to distinguish between civil society and the state. However, he ultimately sees the civil society as a bastion of class hegemony which is ultimately supportive of the state. Taiwan has a female population of 11.17 million, out of a June 2005 total of 22.72 million. Roles of both genders have been redefined over recent decades as more and more of Taiwan's women pursue higher education, join the workforce, gain financial independence, and compete with men in all walks of life.
Almost half of the country's adult women are now regular wage earners. Women's educational opportunities continue to improve. There were 595,903 female college and university graduates in 2002, up from 314,331 in 1997; and 71,595 earning master's degrees, up from 21,656. Prior to female immigration’s naturalization policy, the country’s court generally recognized a married women’s ability to pursue naturalization or to maintain her premarital citizenship while they married foreign people in United States in 1930s. J. Stanley Lemons first rescued the subject of women’s nationality right from three decades of obscurity with the exploration of the events leading to the passage of the Married women Independent citizenship Act
(Cable Act) in 1922 (Bredbenner, 1998,3). The States adopted the dual citizenship as a national affliction. The country would treat the non-resident woman who married to an American as an alien if her country of origin still claimed her as a citizen, but if her country mandated her expatriation for an alien marriage the United States adopted her as an American, saving her from statelessness.
The case of Elisabeth Abeldt-Fricker would highlight the confusion of nationality of transnational marriage. Elisabeth Abeldt-Fricker had married an American citizen in 1892 and divorced him in 1905. She returned to her native country Switzerland lived in a Swiss insane asylum. Her medical care fee became critical between two countries. The Swiss government declared that she was an American citizen despite her divorce and called on U. S. officials to assume the costs. The government of United States informed Swiss authorities that Elisabeth Abeldt-Fricker had forfeited her American citizenship and assumed her former nationality when she left the States to resettle in her native country and refused to pay her treatment.
Another case was about Louisa Lassonne. She was also a native Swiss and married a naturalized American in Russia in 1874 but she and her deceased husband had never returned to the United States successfully, since the government of the States refused to renew her passport. She wrote that: ‘I thought that I had the right to the aid and protection from country I become a citizen by legal rights, and instead of that I am refused a passport.’ The government of the United States refused her request because she still had her original nationality.
Why the immigration of women is controversial in the history of female immigration? In the juridical development of the United States may reveal some biased opinions. The Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization asserted that marriage might be the channel of fraudulent marriage between Americans and foreign countries. The immigrant prostitute is another problem. According to the famous Dillingham Commission report that the immigration officials generally assumed Chinese women immigrating as the wives of citizens were commodities in the international prostitute trade market in the nineteenth century. The import of prostitute had been excluded in the in the Immigration Act as ‘imported for the purpose of prostitution’ is unlawful which is another debated issue. The Dillingham Commission contributed to the discussion with an investigation of immigrant women who married American either to gain permanent entry into the country or to beat deportation orders. The Dillingham Commission provided some documentation of white women’s resort to fraudulent marriage to avoid deportation in New York City.
In the case of Mary Doe, she was arrested for prostitution and she was convicted to serve the witness in another prostitution case. She confessed that: ‘Don’t you know what he wanted from me, that fellow Reo? Don’t you know that he had another girl in his house at---street, and when we got there he introduce me to her (an old prostitute named Laura) and told me she was her wife, but that I would stay with them and that we both make good money by both hustling from his house?...I now make $5 or $6 a day, which I keep for self and Reo stays with his affinity, Laura. Of course, you know, John, that if I married that fellow Reo, it was only to beat deportation and be safe forever, as I am now an American citizen.’ (Bredbenner, 1998,32)
The restriction of immigration from ‘sexually immoral classes’ may challenge some radical the feminists now and if the husband claims that his wife’s citizenship and the immigration officials would not interfere it though the immigration officials usually cast a jaundiced eye on some immigration women’s marital arrangement before the American male and foreign women got marriage to citizen. The female immigration policy remained strongly male-oriented in the Naturalization Act of the States in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century.
It was another problem that women naturalized by marriage to an American did not receive a certificate of citizenship from the federal government to her was one of the administrative inadequacies. The true substance of legislator’s commitment to marital naturalization became apparent after ratification of the woman suffrage amendment in the Nineteenth Amendment around the 1920s.
The citizenship of female immigrants which is binding to her husband’s country is a kind of derivative naturalization. Ironically, the suffragists of suffrage movement had warned American the fear of the aliens which referred to the foreign born or foreign women when American men left for war and the aliens of dubious character would rush in to fill the political voice. They claimed that if citizen women had the power to vote, they could guard against aliens assaults on American’s government.
The president of the National American women Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Carrie Chagman Catt indicated that ‘Not only a burning patriotism has aroused the women of these States as never before to work for their rights to voice their own principles of government, but a real desire to protect the interest of their sons and husbands at the front from possible domination by a hostile spirit at home’
(Bredbenner, 1998,49). Yet some suffragists steadfastly withheld the concept of aliens. J. Maud Campbell, who lecturing to the Boston chapter of NAWSA on the
competence of the foreign born women as voters and assured her listeners that the foreign-born woman was more reliable than her male counterpart. She argued that as a mother and voter, and endorsed the immigrants women would support the child welfare legislation of NAWSA (Bredbenner, 1998,50).
From the view of assimilationists the immigrant women not only devoted to her family but also wished her-selves to a larger world where American customs prevailed.
Those un-assimilated foreign mothers would loose the power of participating the school of her children and the society of her husband. Then the immigrant mother would become the last member in her family and that family would be also far reached by the American influence. For example, if the foreign mother is not familiar with the language of the immigration country would be harder to participate both the school and social life of her children and husband. How to enable the foreign mother to be educated is fundamental for her to take the full responsibility both in home and in community. The civic training of immigrant women initiated the program of citizenship classes. The Citizenship Training Division of the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization made efforts to encourage immigrant women of the naturalization petitioners to attend the citizenship classes with her spouses. From the formal letter of the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization claimed the respect from the country ‘the United States government is especially interested in you….American is to be your home, and the government knows you desire to be an American in every respect’. It was over five million immigrant women at around twenty one years old or older living in the United States according to the 1910 census.
The Naturalization Act of 1855 guaranteed that the great majority of these immigrant women could be naturalized immediately if they married American citizens.
The linkage of commercialization of women and female labor has been long concerned in the course of New Marxist. ‘The more that capital and the theories of its operation become delocalized, the more that local regimes are held accountable for their places within the global organization of capital…the chains of events by which economic crisis is said to spread…’(Scott and Keats, 2004). Mellisa W. Wright used the term of ‘Asia on the Water’ (AOTW) to call for the attention of women working in the factories of the global firms in the Third World, their lives are disposable under both the economic growth from the nation state and managerial demands. The catastrophy of capitalist is spread from one country to another, though some scholars oppose this fact (Acker, 1987).
Basically, the transition refers to the time sequence. Civil society is defined as a
space for people’s actions where may NGOs actions take place (Fowler, 1993; Foley and Edwards, 1996). The movement of judicial reform on criticizing the dichotomy of public/private sphere for women had identified that the politics was defined as the masculine. The key paper of this important discourse was the famous feminist Peggy Watson. She strongly criticized the male-dominated politics and indicated it in the paper of ‘The Rise of Masculinism in Eastern Europe’ published in the journal of New Left Review in 1993. While criticizing the globalism, gender and class and attempting to rethought the possible transition for the provision of the development in feminism Peggy Watson indicated the fundamental demands on the ‘change in laws and rules’ which was the basic element of institutional arrangement.
Though the political space has the positional quality but if the transition carries the invocation of ‘freedom’ space extends and constructs as an ‘extra-political process’
which gained the energy of ‘space of creation’ or ‘political space’. During the pre-World War II the phrase independent citizenship held meanings both referred to equal citizenship right for women and as well as focused on the reform objects of the abolition marital expatriation and naturalization by the female activists from the 1920s to 1930s (Bredbenner, 1998). But compared to the suffrage campaign, J.
Stanley Lemons acknowledged the result of independent citizenship was ‘an unambiguous feminist issue’ and remained in ideological level though the crusade for equal nationality right began in the spring of 1907 in the States while the Congress had declared that ‘any American women who married a foreigner shall take the nationality of her husband’ and the federal government denationalized thousands of American women for marring foreign citizens. This law based on the distrust of aliens which was also endorsed the restriction of voting privilege and tended to adopt to the native born called Expatriation Act of 1907. Before the Expatriation Act, the Naturalization Act in 1855 removed the so called ambiguity of ‘parents’ in an 1802 statue and with eliminating any claim by mothers to control over the ‘legitimate’
children’s citizenship. Together with this patriarch concept of mid-nineteenth century, the common and statutory law also denied many foreign-born women and children independent civil rights and political identities in the United States. Thus any non-citizen, or immigrant woman would have been barred by common law tradition from owning, transferring title, or inherit land, property in the States as one federal agent explained from the case of Elise Lebret, ‘the United States statue stands upon the ground of public policy, not on the ground of the wife’s consent…She may object to this naturalization and protest ever so formally that she would not become an American citizen;…it makes no difference. The law, founded on a wise public policy, requires her nationality to be the same as her husband’s, and she becomes by
operation of law an American citizen.’ (Bredbenner, 1998, 21)
‘Marital naturalization was not about empowering immigrant wives through citizenship, it was about reaffirming the privileges of their citizen husbands.’
(Bredbenner, 1998, 21)
The campaign against dependent citizenship had launched by some organized women groups in spite of facing the strong resistance from the congress of the States.
Not all agencies of federal governments agreed the concept of Naturalization Act the Supreme Court declared that the only persons who could not be naturalized upon marriage to American men were women racially ineligible for naturalization. In the case of Kelly v. Owen et al, (1865), a women’s country of residence, time of marriage and other factors could plausibly affect a foreign wife’s claim of U.S. citizenship.
The expansion of Kelly’s case both as precedent and as the resource on interpretational conflicts between federal judges and the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization has developed. Many legal experts interpreted the door was open to women of racially eligible for naturalization (Bredbenner, 1998).
While discussing the feminist theory in the international law, Western feminists are not only able to move beyond their own limited experience to explore the experience of other Third World women, but also focused their inquiry on ‘cross cultural’ validity.
The women in the Third world are subject to greater oppression due to the colonialism and capitalism but their lives should not be conformed to the Western model. They argued that ‘feminist analysis which attempts to cross national, racial, and ethnic boundaries produce and reproduce difference’ through the ‘naturalization of analytic categories which are supposed to have cross cultural validity’ (Mohanty, 1992).
Inherited the liberal theory and liberal doctrines, gender becomes the central category of oppression and women’s experiences are predetermined, ahistoric, and denuded of racialized. The concept of international human rights helps to reconstruct the equality of women and the state sovereignty attempt to move beyond the rigid distinction between public and private spheres in the international law level.
Feminist international law scholars challenge the objectivity and neutrality of international law, arguing the ignorance of international laws which are structured on and represented the interest of man as the ‘embodied subordinators of women’ (Olsen, 1993). They also reflect the ideological division of public and private sphere based on the framework of the different state regulations of the ‘civic’ and ‘home’ arenas, consequently, the different lives of men and women.
5. Conclusion
Transitional justice is not a political ideology, it’s an effort to judge and explain the legitimacy not only when the regime is changing but also the governmental action is functioning. Any various groups, including the parties, regimes, and any public/
private organizations while they are in transferring the basic respect of human rights are mattered in the course of transactional justice. The preference is easily aroused in the course of common social experience. The notions of objectivity are not the privilege for the lawyer. Not out of merely barebones liberalism or socialism, the
private organizations while they are in transferring the basic respect of human rights are mattered in the course of transactional justice. The preference is easily aroused in the course of common social experience. The notions of objectivity are not the privilege for the lawyer. Not out of merely barebones liberalism or socialism, the