Women never had the right to pass on natural born status prior to the 14th Amendment [father’s citizenship always essential], and no new rights were added by it. Why did you fail to notice the point?
Quoting Greetings Puny Humans:
[quote]
... the 14th amendment did not add any privileges, it merely provided additional guarantee of protection for such rights they already had. From the court Syllabus:
“The right of suffrage was not necessarily one of the privileges or immunities of citizenship before the adoption of the fourteenth amendment, and that amendment does not add to these privileges and immunities. It simply furnishes additional guaranty for the protection of such as the citizen already had.”
[unquote]
I realise that even an originalist is not a strict constructionist. It would be fine to point out the difference. Maybe that would clear it up.
— FRegards ....
The law didn't recognize a woman's "right" to pass citizenship to one foreign born, until 1934. Her ability to pass her citizenship to a child born abroad depended on her being married to a man who had been a resident (alien) of the US for a certain number of years.
Bellei does a good job of describing the changes in naturalization laws from 1790 until the time Bellei was born. As you no doubt know, the naturalization statutes are more liberal now.
The essence of your point is absolutely true. Citizenship at the time of the founding was a function of place of birth and the father's citizenship. The wife/mother's citizenship was not a factor for birth in wedlock.
My remarks above are just on the subject of citizenship. NBC is a different inquiry, and the 14th amendment made no change relating to NBC, in my view at any rate.
The 14th amendment did not add rights, but it did contain language that on its face required that rights afforded to one class of Citizen must apply to all. Rights are afforded to the citizenry as a whole, not parceled out here and there. Certain rights reserved for for men and others while denied to women is profoundly antithetical to any notion of equal protection of the law.
Courts often err.
This court relied on a tortured rationalization in order to assert, as the Court did here, that the 14th Amendment meant that the equal protection of the law did not necessarily apply to any already existing inequality before the law, only to a hypothetical inequality that might be enacted in the future. In other words, at least SOME preexisting inequalities were 'grandfathered' in despite the Amendment making no such provision.
This is an obvious absurdity.