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If you think that foreign women who marry American men automatically become U.S citizens without having to be naturalized, you're even further behind the eight-ball here than I might've thought. I married a foreign woman who NATURALIZED as an American citizen several years later.

I said "for a long time" That was the law from 1855 to 1922. Wilson's mother became a US citizen when she married his father without having to officially renounce her loyalty to Britain. Ditto with Hoover's Canadian-born mother.

Congress was explicitly granted the power in the Constitution to determine the rules for immigration and naturalization. No such power was granted to determine natural born citizenship.

But changes in the law of naturalization meant changes in the natural born citizenship status of individuals (if you accept the idea that "natural born citizens" are different from other citizens from birth).

[Behind the Blue Wall]

I don’t think changes in the law of naturalization change natural born citizenship status. I think the correct reading of that provision is that you are either a citizen by operation of natural law, or you are a citizen by operation of statutory law. If you turn it around and say, who is that Congress would not have the power to deprive of citizenship, then you have your category of natural born citizens. Right now there’s some dispute about whether you could by Congressional act deny citizenship to anchor babies. If so, they are not natural born citizens. If not, they are natural born citizens. The classes of citizens that have never been disputed as citizens which Congress therefore could never deny citizenship to would be those born here of parents who are citizens. Children born of abroad to fathers who are citizens were probably originally part of that group as well. Mothers were by themselves capable of passing citizenship to their children until a Congressional statute was passed to that effect, so children born to U.S. citizen mothers and foreign fathers are probably not.

The rubber then hits the road as to whether it’s legitimate to “update” the original understanding from natural law to then also include the mother. Maybe, but I would put forward that the purpose was to prevent divided loyalties from birth, and as such, if the rule is to become gender neutral, it would have to read only children born abroad to two citizens.