  This paper discusses the elastic behavior of a single polyelectrolyte chain.
A simple scaling analysis as in self avoiding walk chains are not possible,
because three interplaying relevant length scales are involved, i.e., the Debye
screening length and the Pincus blob size. Therefore a selfconsistent
computation of an effective variational propagator is employed. It is shown
that the elastic force f is proportional to the end to end distance R for small
f. For larger forces we find a new regime, characterized by deformations larger
than a computed electrostatic "blob size". These results are supported by
simulations and intuitive physical arguments.
