FEW WOMEN SEEK NATURALIZATION
Or, if she be unmarried, the conditions are little better so far as concerns encouragement to be interested in political affairs. It is only potentially that she is a factor in the political future of the country. The fact that the statistical analysis of the Americanization Study of more than 26,000 naturalization petitions filed in twenty-nine courts in the fiscal year 1913–14 showed only 154 women petitioners indicates that the unmarried foreign-born woman does not excite herself on the subject of the ballot. The real problem of the foreign-born woman, so far as her equipment as a voter is concerned, has reference almost entirely to the vast number of women who are carried into citizenship and potential voting power by the naturalization of their husbands. This is a serious matter.
The Naturalization Bureau makes much of its effort to enlist the interest of the women, by calling their attention to the educational opportunities in the vicinity of their homes; it may be conceded that this has had beneficial results in general, and has been vastly better than the former policy of ignoring the newly made woman citizen; but even giving full value to the claims made by various persons as to the increased interest and response of the wives of naturalized men, the total of actual accomplishment, as against the total of available foreign women is negligible. The plain fact of the matter is that the foreign-born women, naturalized by the act of their husbands in the proportion of more than sixty women to one hundred men, pay just as much attention to the business and to their new opportunities, as might be expected in the circumstances.
During the war it was even the subject of resentment, on the part of the wives of alien enemies, that they were thus forced into American citizenship regardless of their wishes or sympathies. In many instances of the so-called “military naturalization,” elsewhere described,[152] in which the husband had been taken regardless of his personal sympathies, and had become, while in uniform, a citizen under the provisions of the law which waived all questions of length of residence, and to a great extent the other qualifications which would have been insisted upon in ordinary times, the wife was a rampant enemy, aggravated by the conscription of her man—and often also of her grown sons—yet she became automatically a citizen of the United States, regardless of length of residence, without being required even to go through the empty form of an oath of allegiance. Forthwith she was absolved from the necessity of registering as an alien enemy; forthwith she became for all purposes as much an American citizen and as much a voter potentially as any Daughter of the American Revolution!