The Things She Carried
A Cultural History of the Purse in America
Kathleen B. Casey’s cultural survey The Things She Carried examines purses, pocketbooks, and handbags not through a fashion lens, but as “fraught but vital object[s]” with fascinating histories.
The book’s evocative case studies and contemporary images focus on working- and middle-class women and their pouches of personal items from the antebellum South through the twentieth century, uncovering how purses functioned as emblems of identity, protection, and status. Mining oral histories, artifacts, magazines, and photographs, the book gives voice to people often overlooked in traditional historical narratives.
A common theme is that purses have served as intimate spaces of women’s privacy and power. Riveting scholarship documents how enslaved women used scraps to make bags for secreting food or supplies for future escapes, while abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth used fancier, more visible purses to hold their cartes de visites and establish their credentials as they traveled. As opportunities for women’s work and mobility increased, and in time with the rise of advertising, consumerism, and the development of menstrual and contraceptive products, the purse’s symbolism changed; they became near ubiquitous.
A poignant chapter covers the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, whose fatalities were enhanced by guards checking purses as women workers filed out. Also gripping are the descriptions of how civil rights protesters used “church lady” accessories (hats, purses, and white gloves) as badges of respectability and protection against abuse. A final chapter analyzes the varied uses of the purse in the queer community to signal gender identity and offer physical protection. Fascinating, challenging commentary on social mores runs throughout.
The Things She Carried is an impressive study of how purses not only “enabled humans to morph into marsupials,” but played important roles as “objects with agency” throughout centuries of American history.
Reviewed by
Rachel Jagareski
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
