The American women who fought for their own passports
From Atlas Obscura.
The 1920s Women Who Fought For the Right to Travel Under Their Own Names
Being listed as “and wife” in a joint passport was just not going to fly.
The current U.S. passport includes 13 inspirational quotes from notable Americans. Only one belongs to a woman, the African-American scholar, educator, and activist Anna J. Cooper. On pages 26-27 are words she wrote in 1892: “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class-it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.”
If equality is a journey, then it should come as no surprise that passports have helped American women to cross some of society’s most entrenched cultural borders for more than a century.
U.S. passports predate the Declaration of Independence, but the documents were issued on an ad hoc basis until the late 1800s, when the process began to standardize. By then, a single woman was issued a passport in her own name, but a married woman was only listed as an anonymous add-on to her husband’s document: “Mr. John Doe and wife.”
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As the passport continued to evolve as an official marker of American citizenship, it attracted the interest of women’s rights activists. Shortly after her wedding in 1917, writer Ruth Hale applied for a passport under her maiden name before departing for France to work as a war correspondent. Her request was denied, and when Hale returned to New York a year later, she embarked on what became a lifelong crusade to use her maiden name on legal documents. In 1920, Hale was issued a passport under the name “Mrs. Heywood Broun, otherwise known as Ruth Hale.” She returned the document, and though the State Department experimented with various alternative phrasings, Hale never received a passport she found acceptable.
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The decision to drop marital information entirely was unceremoniously announced in a 1937 memo by longtime Passport Division head Ruth Shipley, who later became notorious for denying passports to suspected communists during the Cold War. Shipley’s memo was surprisingly straightforward considering the length and public acrimony of the battle over a woman’s right to travel under the name of her choice. It read in part: “because our position would be very difficult to defend under any really definite and logical attack, it seems the part of wisdom to make the change.”
And with that, women’s rights advocates gave American passports their stamp of approval.
Click headline for story.
This entry was originally posted at http://thnidu.dreamwidth.org/1603804.html. You can comment here, or there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth ID.
comments there so far.
The 1920s Women Who Fought For the Right to Travel Under Their Own Names
Being listed as “and wife” in a joint passport was just not going to fly.
The current U.S. passport includes 13 inspirational quotes from notable Americans. Only one belongs to a woman, the African-American scholar, educator, and activist Anna J. Cooper. On pages 26-27 are words she wrote in 1892: “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class-it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.”
If equality is a journey, then it should come as no surprise that passports have helped American women to cross some of society’s most entrenched cultural borders for more than a century.
U.S. passports predate the Declaration of Independence, but the documents were issued on an ad hoc basis until the late 1800s, when the process began to standardize. By then, a single woman was issued a passport in her own name, but a married woman was only listed as an anonymous add-on to her husband’s document: “Mr. John Doe and wife.”
...
As the passport continued to evolve as an official marker of American citizenship, it attracted the interest of women’s rights activists. Shortly after her wedding in 1917, writer Ruth Hale applied for a passport under her maiden name before departing for France to work as a war correspondent. Her request was denied, and when Hale returned to New York a year later, she embarked on what became a lifelong crusade to use her maiden name on legal documents. In 1920, Hale was issued a passport under the name “Mrs. Heywood Broun, otherwise known as Ruth Hale.” She returned the document, and though the State Department experimented with various alternative phrasings, Hale never received a passport she found acceptable.
...
The decision to drop marital information entirely was unceremoniously announced in a 1937 memo by longtime Passport Division head Ruth Shipley, who later became notorious for denying passports to suspected communists during the Cold War. Shipley’s memo was surprisingly straightforward considering the length and public acrimony of the battle over a woman’s right to travel under the name of her choice. It read in part: “because our position would be very difficult to defend under any really definite and logical attack, it seems the part of wisdom to make the change.”
And with that, women’s rights advocates gave American passports their stamp of approval.
Click headline for story.
This entry was originally posted at http://thnidu.dreamwidth.org/1603804.html. You can comment here, or there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth ID.
comments there so far.