The Blitz(ed) Body: bodily autonomy and institutional reform in Susan Ertz and Virginia Woolf

Framing the argument in the wake of modernist discourse around the female body and fertility, this essay looks to two examples of interwar women’s literature–Susan Ertz’s Woman Alive (1936) and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938)–to demonstrate how women were reprising and responding to interwar discourses around women’s reproduction and war. Both Ertz’s novel and Woolf’s polemic use textual surface-depth models to scaffold metaphors of the body alongside metaphors of ideological struggle. In so doing, they also imagine new ways of weaponizing the body towards producing a more egalitarian future, demonstrating their vital role as writers of speculation, futurity, and the body.