Doan's examination of women, machines, speed and war uses Radclyffe Hall's short story ('Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself') as a framework in which to read the published and unpublished accounts of women's handling of the tangible and intangible aspects of the mechanics of auto/mobility in their work of driving ambulances near the front lines during the Great War. Such vehicles, Doan argues, allowed these women, primarily of the educated upper and middle classes, new experiences of mobility and, in so doing, may have freed them from the constraints of gender. Investigating both fiction and non-fiction best equips us to rethink women's intimate relationship in wartime to the utter quintessence of modernity: the machinery of auto/mobility and mechanized speed, concepts discussed frequently by cultural theorists such as Paul Virilio, but rarely in relation to gender or sexual difference. Auto/mobility foregrounds not only individual agency in the ability to move or the passivity of 'being moved', but the will to move: the motion of the self-activated in a spatial realm, as sexed and gendered bodies shift from the home front to the war front, and back again; the active labour in the operation and care of machines; the temporality and speed of the individual journey; and the interdependence of human and machine. Doan's scrutiny of the female ambulance driver, highly visible in her distinctive work at the Western Front, and always occupying something of a no man's land in terms of gender ambiguity, situates gender at the nexus of machines, speed and war, and thus allows us to better understand modernity and modern life.
