Review: Deborah Clarke. Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America.

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: An association between automobiles and masculinity has existed in American popular mythology since the earliest days of motoring. The association relies upon understandings of gender that have been subject to negotiation throughout the twentieth century — in part due to social changes linked to the rise of car culture. Deborah Clarke’s Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America examines how cultural portrayals of women and cars have registered and participated in shifting conceptions of female identity and female agency.