Passports and women, 1920 to 1939

Bearer prints the forms as the period printed them, and the period's forms assume a man. Page 1 of the international type reads "accompanied by his wife", whoever holds the booklet.

Bearer makes an investigator's papers for Call of Cthulhu and any 1920s or 1930s tabletop campaign: the passport a consul would have filled in, with the visas and frontier stamps a campaign leaves in it, and the permits, certificates and tickets of the period, to print or to share.

A single woman

She held a passport in her own name, the same booklet as anyone. She is its bearer; the printed family lines stay blank.

A married woman

Most often she travelled on her husband's passport: her description beside his, her photograph next to his, under one stamp. That is the joint passport.

When she held a passport of her own, it was made out in her husband's name. In the United States it described her as "the wife of Mr. John Doe", and went on doing so for most women until the late 1930s.

The first exceptions

Helena Normanton, barrister, was in 1924 the first married British woman issued a passport in her maiden name. Doris Fleischman's, in 1925, was the first American passport that did not describe a married woman as the wife of her husband. Both made the news.

Nationality by marriage

Under the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914, a British woman who married a foreigner took his nationality and lost her own, and with it her right to a British passport.

Sources

• League of Nations, Advisory and Technical Committee for Communications and Transit, Resolution adopted by the Conference on Passports, Customs Formalities and Through Tickets in Paris on October 21st, 1920 (Passport Conference, Preparatory Documents II), C.641.M.230.1925.VIII (read directly)
• Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Document (Oxford University Press, 2010), as quoted by S. Knisely, 'The 1920s Women Who Fought For the Right to Travel Under Their Own Names', Atlas Obscura, 27 March 2017, and R. Dickzen, 'The Right of Married American Women to be More than "And Wife" on a Passport', 30 March 2017 (secondary source)
• Wikipedia, Helena Normanton (secondary source)

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