Soldiers and Wayward Women: Gendered Citizenship, and Migration Policy in Argentina, Italy and Spain since 1850

Abstract

Policies that regulate peoples international movement and their state membership have historically made distinctions based on perceived sexual differences, but little is known about the process by which this has happened. This paper explores how and with what consequences migration and nationality policies have been gendered in two quintessential countries of emigration (Italy and Spain), and in a country of immigrants (Argentina) over a 150-year period. I argue that these migration and nationality policies have reflected the dynamics of the political fields in which they have been crafted. Especially before the Great War, laws and official practices that showed a disproportionate interest in men as soldiers and workers, and in women as mothers and as morally suspect subjects mirrored a dynamic of competition over migrants among these countries. A subsequent harmonization of policies reflected a dynamic of accommodation to the realities of a settled emigrant population and dual nationality. In addition, the administrative mechanisms coupled with these laws have operated differently with respect to men and women. The consequences of these laws and mechanisms have persisted even when the letter of the law has ostensibly become gender neutral.