ABSTRACT
Feminist scholars have long discussed the complex interrelationship of Woman and Nation in the specific context of bourgeois societies—an interrelationship which does not involve actual women as social individuals, but rather one produced by means of categories of femininity and masculinity as constructions of a descriptive system. In this context of nation, women also demarcate the boundaries of the community. It was precisely the symbolic barrier, based upon the elements and established in the political context of the postwar era in Austria, which was obviously regarded as jeopardized by the trespasses of the “GI brides.” Traditional patterns of thinking obviously made it difficult for many postwar Austrians to accept the “GI brides’” lifestyle and to understand it for what it actually was: one of many individual attempts to make a fresh start in the aftermath of the deficits, privation, losses, and overwork of wartime.
