The Qualities of a Citizen

Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870-1965

Martha Gardner

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780691144436, 9780691089935
• eBook ISBN: 9781400826575
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

The Qualities of a Citizen traces the application of U.S. immigration and naturalization law to women from the 1870s to the late 1960s. Like no other book before, it explores how racialized, gendered, and historical anxieties shaped our current understandings of the histories of immigrant women. The book takes us from the first federal immigration restrictions against Asian prostitutes in the 1870s to the immigration "reform" measures of the late 1960s. Throughout this period, topics such as morality, family, marriage, poverty, and nationality structured historical debates over women's immigration and citizenship.


At the border, women immigrants, immigration officials, social service providers, and federal judges argued the grounds on which women would be included within the nation. As interview transcripts and court documents reveal, when, where, and how women were welcomed into the country depended on their racial status, their roles in the family, and their work skills. Gender and race mattered.


The book emphasizes the comparative nature of racial ideologies in which the inclusion of one group often came with the exclusion of another. It explores how U.S. officials insisted on the link between race and gender in understanding America's peculiar brand of nationalism. It also serves as a social history of the law, detailing women's experiences and strategies, successes and failures, to belong to the nation.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• In the Shadow of the Law
• Part I Wives, Mothers, and Maids
• Chapter One Immigrants, Citizens, and Marriage
• Chapter Two The Limits of Derivative Citizenship
• Chapter Three Seeing Difference
• Chapter Four Constructing a Moral Border
• Chapter Five Likely to Become
• Chapter Six Toil and Trouble
• Part II Citizens, Residents, and Non-Americans
• Chapter Seven When Americans Are Not Citizens
• Chapter Eight When Citizens Are Not White
• Chapter Nine Reproducing the Nation
• Chapter Ten Women in Need
• Chapter Eleven At Work in the Nation
• Part III Marriage, Family, and the Law
• Chapter Twelve Families, Made in America
• Chapter Thirteen Marriage and Morality
• CONCLUSION
• A Brief Guide to Archival Sources
• Acknowledgments