In theory the law was designed to grant women their own national identity; however, in practice, as it still retained vestiges of coverture, tying a woman's legal identity to her husband's, it had to be amended multiple times before it granted women citizenship in their own right.

As early as 1804, US Naturalization Acts specifically tied married women's access to citizenship to their state of marriage.

[8] To confirm her nationality, a wife was required to provide a copy of her marriage record and her husband's proof of citizenship.

[11] During the early 1920s, numerous laws and court cases dealt with establishing the eligibility of people to become citizens who were non-white.

After the ruling of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind in 1923, nearly all Asians were excluded as ineligible for citizenship.

[11] Under its terms, an American male citizen's foreign-born wife could take advantage of a streamlined one-year process to apply for her naturalization.

[26] If her spouse was a citizen or able to naturalize, a wife could repatriate if she lived in or re-entered the United States, and applied as a foreigner.

[12][27] Because of the restricted number of immigrants from each country specified in the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, a woman might not be allowed to return.

[1][29] This was seen as punitive, as people who voluntarily renounced their citizenship merely had to take the oath of allegiance to restore their nationality[13] and because women were not reinstated as natural-born citizens.

[28] 1930 Cable Act Amendments removed the loss of an American woman's citizenship if she lived abroad with an alien spouse, bringing parity to the treatment of men and women, as men did not lose their citizenship if they lived abroad with a foreign wife.

[33] The 1931 amendment to the Cable Act allowed women to retain their American citizenship even if they married a person ineligible for naturalization.

[38] Because there was no reference to gender, the amended Cable Act extended the special naturalization rules of spousal citizenship to husbands of American wives.