Driving Women examines the intertwining of cars and women in American fiction, primarily but not exclusively written by women. Ranging throughout the twentieth century, Deborah Clarke finds numerous authors who have made automobiles vital to or important in their novels. Taking as a starting point that these vehicles are essential to understanding modern American society and culture, she makes use of feminist and critical theory to sharpen an analysis that challenges readers to refocus the classic questions about American identity. No longer should white males be the central figures in setting standards. All women and other males can claim authenticity and their ability to do so can be understood in how they access cars.

Drawing on the traditional public/private dichotomy and the positioning of women in the domestic sphere, the car becomes a means of moving between and destabilizing fixed boundaries. Once women sit behind the wheel and demonstrate that they are there to stay they have the capacity to become much more flexible about their roles in society. Cars give, and have given, women power both materially and imaginatively to re-gender American culture. Even at a time when only upper-class ladies could afford, and female daredevils had the nerve, to drive, the car as masculine technology was challenged. Once many more women started to drive after the Second World War, and after the move to the suburbs, the car gave women agency to break away from restrictive social frameworks. Some women may still never make a clean break, nor wish to do so, but it has become impossible to typecast the female lifestyle when women can negotiate their identities through automobility.

This theme of domesticity in transit is portrayed in literary texts that are both canonical and popular. Authors who are scrutinized include Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Louise Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver, Helena Viramontes, Dorothy Allison, Marge Piercy, Erica Lopez and many others. Ideas and themes are turned on their heads as women and some men use the car to position themselves elsewhere through the medium of getaway vehicles on road journeys that take them into a new style of citizenship which is fluid, multicultural and dynamic. It should now no longer be possible to teach a module on modern American literature without considering the tradition of women's automotive fiction and how this impacts on American identity.