The Citizenship of Married Women in Iceland 1898–1952

Shortly before Icelandic women gained full political rights with the enactment of a new constitutional law in 1920, another law had been passed which diminished the freedom and independence of married women. This was the first Icelandic citizenship law, enacted in October 1919. It upheld a special provision from the older Danish law of 1898 stipulating that a woman who married a foreigner would automat ically acquire citizenship of her husband’s country of origin and lose her Icelandic citizenship. Likewise, a foreign-born woman automat ically gained Icelandic citizenship through a marriage to an Icelander. From the nineteenth into the mid-twentieth century, most countries made a married woman’s citizenship dependent on that of her husband. Around the First World War, the International Council of Women (ICW) and the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), as well as the women’s movement in Scandinavia, put the issue of married women’s citizenship on their agenda. The practice of depriving women their right to citizenship of their country of origin took on added significance after the outbreak of the war, when some women suddenly found themselves considered enemy nationals in their land of birth. The Icelandic Women’s Rights Association (IWRA) was well informed about the international campaign for the independent citizenship of married women, including the new and improved citizenship laws that were passed in Scandi navia in 1924–1925. At the urging of the IWRA in early 1926, Ingibjörg H. Bjarna son, the first female member of the Icelandic parliament, drafted a bill to revise the citizenship law in the same vein as in Scandinavia, where a woman who married a foreigner retained her citizenship as long as she stayed in her native country but relinquished it if she left. Ingibjörg’s proposal was well received, and amendments were made to the citizenship law. However, a subsequent board of the IWRA believed these amendments were not sufficient. For the next quarter of the century, the IWRA repeatedly drafted new bills on the citizenship of married women, without success. When the citizenship law was finally changed in 1952, it was not due to feminist demands, but rather to align Icelandic legislation with that of Scandinavia. The new law allowed married women to maintain their own citizenship independent of their husbands’, but it did not change the citizenship status of those women who had married a foreigner before 1952. They were still deprived of civil and political rights and had the same legal status as foreign-born Icelandic residents.