We hear of some people marrying others so that they can obtain citizenship. However, did you know at one point in US history there was a law that made women choose between marrying the person they loved or losing their citizenship?

The law stated if a woman married an “ineligible or non-citizen,” she would be stripped of her own citizenship. The premise was that women took the nationality of their husbands. Since the husbands were not US citizens, the women who married them lost their US citizenship.

This law, the Cable Act, was finally changed in 1931 to allow women to at least be able to marry men from select countries and retain their citizenship; the Act was put to a complete end in 1936.