Maura E. Hametz
Stateless Women: The Citizenship Conundrum in the Adriatic Provinces after World War I
After World War I, idiosyncratic factors affected states’ conceptions of national belonging and
allegiance, but common western European legal traditions and practices provided the foundations for their
determinations of individuals’ legal status. Assumptions embedded in European legal systems rendered
women invisible or powerless under European laws, treating them as ‘objects’ not ‘subjects’ of the law.
Women’s legal claims to citizenship and national belonging relied on family ties, on the legal status of
their fathers or their husbands. In this climate of women’s ‘dependent nationality’, what was required of
women was not allegiance, but obedience --- to fathers, to husbands, and to states.
Such scholars as Bhabha, Klug, and Shutter have suggested that legal frameworks and
institutional practice left women in a situation of ‘effective statelessness’. This terminology reflects a
particular political and feminist stance that relies on a moral judgment on the status of women in society.
Nancy Cott described the position of women in terms of their lack of equal rights, limited political
participation, and indirect access to entitlements as ‘halfway citizenship’. This offers a more succinct and
legalistic definition, but it too blurs the lines between social (implied) and legal (regulated) status. This
paper explores citizenship as a fundamental right and a legally-defined and bureaucratically-regulated
status supervised by states desirous of a loyal citizenry. After World War I, many women experienced
not ‘effective statelessness’ but real, legal and practical statelessness that abandoned them in the
interstices of an interwar society that relied increasingly on ethno-nationalist states to define, protect, and
extend individual rights.
After World War I, in Italy’s newly-acquired Adriatic borderlands, ambiguities, contradictions,
and inconsistencies in treaty provisions and obligations, contained in the Treaties of St. Germain, Trianon
and subsequent local agreements, left thousands of individuals without clear citizenship claims. The
Italian Interior Ministry responded in 1922 with the establishment of a Citizenship Commission in Trieste
which, over the course of its fifteen year existence, responded to citizenship appeals filed by hundreds of
women in the border territory of Venezia Giulia. Its deliberations forced the liberal government and then
the Fascist state to address women’s marginalized and liminal status in order to maintain social stability
and preserve the family as a building block of the nation.
While well-known feminist agendas pushed against the state and legal frameworks in the fight for
extension of voting rights, equal professional or educational opportunities, and social reforms, women
seeking to regularize their citizenship status sought remedies within the extant legal framework. This
paper demonstrates how women’s statelessness posed a conundrum for officials representing patriarchal
institutions throughout Europe: extension of citizenship amounted to recognition and extension of
women’s legal standing and rights while inattention to their plight maintained the gendered social
hierarchy but effectively placed them outside the reach of the state’s control and legal frameworks.
Encouraged to support new nations and asserting the desire for national belonging, women sought to be
included as citizens. Throughout Europe, and particularly in the successor states, they relied on the
assistance of the patriarchal legal institutions and power structures to address their legal plight, to offer
them citizenship, and to welcome them into new states. Officials in Trieste and Italy responded by
increasing the rights of women to actively including them in the national community. By 1931, officials
in Europe and around the world responded in similar ways. The Hague Convention offered more
progressive international standards recognizing women’s individual rights to citizenship.