Making Single Mothers Matter: Reflections on the Vulnerability and Agency of Displaced Persons in Postwar Occupied Austria and Beyond

Abstract

This article explores the experiences of displaced women and their children in occupied postwar Austria by focusing both on the assistance provided to them by relief workers in displaced persons (DP) camps and on the displaced women's role as persons in charge of planning their own and their children's futures. In doing so, it sheds light on the care infrastructure for a particularly vulnerable group inside Austria's postwar refugee camps — single mothers and those children within their households — while also highlighting the agency of these women in navigating the migration process. The author of this paper argues that studying the situation of displaced single mothers enables us to understand displacement as a process that both fostered a dependence on institutional structures and at the same time created the imperative to develop specific strategies to negotiate one's chances of emigration, such as the use of social networks or the negotiation of citizenship. The main arguments of this paper are embedded in a close analysis of two DP camps in postwar Austria — Kapfenberg in Styria and Feffernitz in Carinthia. A combined examination of reports written by relief workers employed in these camps and two case studies of families that tried to emigrate and leave their camp lives behind allows the author to reflect on dimensions of vulnerability and agency — both of which were characteristic of the postwar experience of so many displaced people in Europe, especially those cast in maternal roles.