SOURCE: Smith, Sidonie. “On the Road: (Auto)Mobility and Gendered Detours.” In Moving Lives: Twentieth-Century Women's Travel Writing, pp. 167-202. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Smith traces the effect of mobility on female travel writers, focusing on two twentieth-century narratives: Beverly Donofrio's Riding in Cars with Boys and Irma Kurtz's The Great American Bus Ride.

Those who have taken the pains to search below the surface for the great tendencies of the age, know what a giant industry is struggling into being there. All signs point to the motor vehicle as the necessary sequence of methods of locomotion already established and approved. The growing needs of our civilization demand it; the public believe in it, and await with lively interest its practical application to the daily business of the world.

—“Salutatory,” Horseless Age (1895)

The intoxication of great speeds in cars is nothing but the...