The Purse Is More Than a Fashion Statement. It’s a Historical and Social Signifier.

Far more than fashion, the purse has long served as a vessel of identity, resistance and survival—especially for those pushed to society’s margins.

The following is excerpted from Kathleen B. Casey’s The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse, out Aug. 4, 2025.

I distinctly remember my first purse, given to me at age 5. It was pink and patent leather and, looking back, it seemed to be silently insisting to the world that I was a girl.

Indeed, purses have always felt like a burdensome object to me, a sort of red flag of forced femininity. Despite my longstanding aversion to purses, I have long needed a container larger than the paltry pockets that irregularly come built into women’s clothing.

While still in graduate school in the early 2000s, I began carrying around my identification, overdrawn debit card, keys, lip balm and a bottle of water in an army-green burlap shoulder bag that might more aptly be described as a “sack.” Somehow this sack felt like a good compromise between a proper purse and a practical container I needed for the devices and detritus of my life.

As I navigated private and public spaces with my sack for a dozen years, I noticed the strong reactions it elicited from those around me. One of my sisters found it so odious that she threatened to do me the favor of sticking it in the garbage disposal or setting it on fire. As it acquired more rips, stains and holes, I haphazardly stitched it back up, only to set it down on dirty floors, precariously balanced it on toilet paper dispensers in public restrooms, and took it across state lines and national borders. Even though it offered limited material security without a closing mechanism, it provided me with a sense of sameness in unfamiliar places. 

As I bantered with my sister about my sack, I began to realize that purses, bags, pocketbooks and sacks are not simply inert receptacles. Instead, they are adaptable toolkits that lead multidimensional lives of their own. Sometimes they pass through the hands and closets of multiple owners across generations. Sometimes they are invaded by the fingers of foreign sets of hands, as my mother’s purse had been in the mid-1960s when a man snuck up behind her and grabbed it. In a moment of defiance that surprised even her, she white-knuckled the straps of her purse until her assailant finally let go and ran off.

As it had for my mother and my mother’s mother, my sack shaped how my body moved, what parts of it were visible to others, and how I navigated space. What I carried inside it revealed how I imagined emergencies and conceptualized dignity and danger.

As toolkits, purses have helped disparate carriers improve their lives and, in some cases, even emancipate themselves from marginal positions.

Purses and bags have always been much more than a fashion accessory. For millennia, they have enabled humans to morph into marsupials. And for just as long, these items have been telling stories about their owners. Purses have been uncommonly useful in helping their carriers create privacy and find autonomy in public. In fact, purses have served ornamental, utilitarian, psychological, linguistic, aesthetic, symbolic and economic functions in American culture. “Purses,” “pocketbooks” and “handbags” (terms that vary by style, size, region and generation) have functioned not simply as accessories but as objects with agency. Countless women (and some men) have used these objects to construct their identities and execute their agendas. As toolkits, purses have helped disparate carriers improve their lives and, in some cases, even emancipate themselves from marginal positions.

The Things She Carried examines how a variety of bags and purses became meaningful for Americans often ignored in studies of fashion and whose possessions are largely left out of museum artifact collections. It asks how one seemingly ordinary object became so ubiquitous, unpacking how and why it became almost exclusively linked to women. It focuses on distinct episodes in the cultural history of bags and purses over the last 200 years, illuminating the many ways that both ordinary and extraordinary Americans used their purses to disrupt existing social, cultural, economic and political structures.

For example, pocketbooks played a surprisingly important role in the devastating Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. Immigrant working women at the factory insisted on keeping their purses at their sides, even though they couldn’t leave the locked doors of the factory without having their purses inspected by a company man. The police used purses to help identify the bodies of the 123 women and girls who perished in the fire, and they played an even more surprising role in the criminal trial that ensued.

… Purses provide an extension of the body, allowing generations of women to carry a miniature version of the home that they could fill with tools to cope with the challenges of a shifting landscape.

Decades later, Black women in the Civil Rights Movement used their purses to hide critical items needed to prepare themselves and protect their bodies as they voted, sat-in, rode on public transportation and integrated schools. Twelve years before she was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Ala., Rosa Parks strategically used her purse to integrate another bus. In 1943, she “dropped” it in the white section, bending down to pick it up as she quickly claimed the seat next to it.

Purses have also been critical for gay men, who were sometimes victims of violence when they carried handbags, while purse-averse butch lesbians consciously kept their distance from purses. Trans women like Marsha P. Johnson even used her brick-filled purse to smash the windshield of a police car during the rebellion at the Stonewall Inn in 1969.

Americans have long used items of apparel such as hats and shoes to express aspirations, amplify differences and alleviate anxieties, but only the purse—with its cavernous, pocketed interior—has also provided marginalized people with much-needed space, privacy and power. Unlike items of apparel placed directly on the body, purses provide an extension of the body, allowing generations of women to carry a miniature version of the home that they could fill with tools to cope with the challenges of a shifting landscape. In fact, the purse has simultaneously functioned as a mobile medicine cabinet, church, bank, armory, office, powder room, companion and confidante. Perhaps most of all, the purse has become a symbolic and material representation of the female body.