Negotiating Family and Citizenship: First World War Brides and the Limits of Exclusion

The end of the First World War did not just redraw national borders—it also reconfigured the boundaries of family, citizenship, and migration. Scholars typically associate the First World War years with immigration slowing to a trickle through 1918, followed by a boom as immigrants scrambled to make their way to the U.S. before the implementation of quotas in 1921 and 1924. This paper examines how the United States’ participation in the First World War shaped immigration policy and argues that war brides—women who married U.S. soldiers during demobilization and occupation—became a critical site for negotiating the boundaries of American immigration law. In the aftermath of the war, approximately 5,000 foreign war brides and over 500 children entered the U.S. aboard military transport ships, armed with visas and citizenship secured through marriage. These unprecedented marriages required the U.S. military to dictate new policy and reconfigure its role in the state’s immigration regulation apparatus. Securing marriage certificates was not without its challenges. For women who found themselves pregnant outside of wedlock, their marriage opportunities were conditional based on their native country, the period in which they sought marriage, and on a soldier’s willingness to claim fatherhood. Potential war brides in the American zone of occupied Germany also wielded pregnancy as a tool to push for exceptions to policies designed to inhibit soldier marriage. This analysis thus establishes these war brides as a lens through which to examine the role of women in historical debates over America’s identity as a nation of immigrants. Finally, by setting First World War foreign brides in the history of marriage-based exceptions to exclusion, I posit them as foreshadowing the emphasis on family reunification that would so powerfully shape U.S. immigration policy into the twenty-first century.