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Kathleen B. Casey, "The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to New Books in History, a podcast on the New Books Network. I'm Yana Byers, your host, and I'm here today with Kathleen B. Casey, professor of History and Director of Women's Genders and Sexuality Studies at Furman University, South Carolina, to talk about her new book, the Things She A Cultural History of the Purse in America, out this year, 2025 with Oxford University Press. Hello, Kathleen, and welcome to the program.
- [01:34]
C
Hi, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
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B
Thanks very much for joining me. And how are you this fine fall day?
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C
I'm wonderful.
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B
Well, it's so exciting. We're going to talk about your really great book, which I had so much fun reading.
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D
Oh, good.
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B
All right. So, listeners, I want to let you know, on the very first page of the introduction, you will find a photo of one, and I'm quoting here, army green burlap Sack, aged approximately 12. It seems the bag is tattered with whole swaths of the original fabric missing. Repairs clearly have been made along the way with some success and not a lot of interest in coherence. And the condition is probably best described most kindly as, well, loved this bag. Yes. So my usual first question is, how do you come to write this book? But I suspect how much this that this bag has something to do with why you've written this book. How close am I there?
- [02:43]
C
Yes, you're very close. You're spot on. Well, there's a couple of avenues through which I approached this. One was I was writing my first book, which is about vaudeville, and I got really interested in the costumes that performers were wearing. And so then I started to research apparel and teach about apparel and realized that apparel could be really powerful, especially for social, cultural historians and for trying to understand gender. But at the same time, I was carrying around the sack that you just so aptly described. And I think I have never really liked purses. They've always felt a little bit.
- [03:25]
D
Over.
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C
Determined, overly girly, somehow, like hyper feminine in a way that I was never really comfortable with. I've always been interested in unpacking how gender works and operates and how it can be, you know, how gender norms can be resisted. And so I think that was my little way of sort of staging a mini, tiny resistance is carrying this tattered sack that. That everyone else constantly remarked was, you know, hideous. And I had a sister in particular. I have a sister in particular who used to comment on it and say, like, I'm not going anywhere with you if you bring that because I don't want to be seen with you. She just thought it made this really dramatic, unflattering statement about me so much that it would make an unflattering statement about her to even be in proximity to me. And so that made me sort of, you know, dig my heels in and want to carry it more and everywhere. And know, as it continued to get full of holes and I try to do little surgeries on it, I just sort of committed to it even more. And I think that I thought it was sort of a compromise between like a proper woman's purse and just like a container that I needed to put stuff in. And so I carried it for years and years and years, and it just continued to get more tattered to the point where people asked me, like, where did you get that boho sack? And I was like, well, it didn't really look boho when I got it. It's organically boho. And so it just made me start to think, like, there's something about this object that seems to be really important to people and particularly to women. It seems to be making these statements that, like, I don't even really want it to be making. But also I. I seem to understand the power of it by insisting on continuing to carry this item, you know, and so that's kind of how I came at it, you know, with a sort of historian's eye, thinking about apparel. And then also through my own, like, sort of personal journey with gender expression and femininity and thinking like I was, you know, anti perse and not fully understanding why. Exactly. And so it just made me think, okay, there's got to be a history here.
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D
Right?
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C
A purse is always meant to, you know, these things. Have they always been sending these powerful messages? Have they always been sort of the property of women? And if not, what was the process? How did that happen? Why did that happen? So that's kind of how it. How it started out. And then it, you know, just unfurled over the years. I started thinking about different moments in American history and how I could look at them differently through the object of a purse.
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D
Right.
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B
It is so powerful. It is a thing that almost every woman carries. And, you know, we have the European man bag, but, like, if a man carries a bag, it means something very different. It's very funny because I saw this title and I was like, oh, hell, yeah, I'm gonna read that. I am a purse lover. I have dozens. Yeah, it's. It's its own. It's its own thing. It's a pathology of its own. It's very different. But so I was very excited to kind of think. To think about it critically. So there's perhaps another reason I was drawn to the book. But then when I faced with your bag, I was like, well, we've definitely come at this from different angles. Let's see how this goes. Good listeners. Good. It went well. So I want to talk first before we get into your argument about your source material. So you use a lot of what we would call material culture. Yeah. Talk to me about what kind of what you use here.
- [07:08]
C
Yeah, well, it's really kind of a blend of different ways of studying history. As I mentioned, it's kind of social history and cultural history. And of course, material culture is kind of a subset of cultural history. So I wanted to look at actual bags themselves as a source of evidence. And I didn't really have a whole lot of training in object based research, which is also sort of getting into maybe kind of art history and anthropology. It's kind of interdisciplinary. It's museum studies. And so I wanted to learn how to read objects as texts. And so I started out doing this summer fellowship with the National Endowment for the Humanities on studying material culture, which was really helpful. So it introduced me to some of the basic theories and methodologies and Then of course, I combined looking at actual purses, which, with other more traditional kinds of texts, like advertisements, newspaper articles, police records, trial transcripts, trade journals, basically everything I could get my hands on to sort of arrange this constellation of different types of evidence and read them, you know, across each other and against each other. And so I found that to be some of the most fun part of the research is to. To go into random museums who many, most of whom don't have like purse collections, Right. But if you go in and you talk to the archivist or the curator and you say, do you have any purses? They'll be like, well, we have this one random thing that this family of the suffragists gave us, and then we have this other unrelated thing, and we don't really know about the provenance of that. And so I started looking at tiny little collections here and there. And I eventually actually went to the Tassel Museum, which is in Amsterdam. Unfortunately, it closed early on during COVID but they had thousands of bags from all over the world that was kind of like a. Whoa. To be there. It was really amazing. And I'm so glad I got to get there shortly before they did close. And so I looked at like, you know, different museums, some of which were like the New York State Museum in Albany, which just had some like. It had a random collection of bags of former patients at the Willard Hospital, which was a place where people who were considered feeble minded or had some sort of mental illness were often dropped and then kind of deserted in upstate New York. And before the building was destroyed, a curator went in there and found hundreds of bags. And there were women's bags on one side of the attic and men on the other. And I got to look. They're not. The collection's now actually closed because of some privacy concerns with hipaa, But I actually got to see a bunch of the bags that were in the collection. And so there were like suitcases, and there were purses inside the suitcases, and then tiny little, you know, like coin purses inside those. And it was just really cool to be able to pull these out. And they had things inside them in some cases.
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D
Right.
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C
Which was so exciting as I got to meet each object. And I often had no idea who these items belonged to, but just trying to make sense of them and think about the mechanisms by which they closed.
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D
Right.
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C
And the materials that they were made of and if there was any actual text on them indicating a brand that would help me figure out, you know, the, the date when it was Manufactured and thinking about how, like, the sizes and the materials and the closing mechanisms of these items change over time with different technologies. But also because women's roles are changing so much. They need more durable materials. They need more secure closing devices. And often persons are getting bigger over time.
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D
Right.
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C
As women's roles are expanding, especially from the 19th century until now. And so that was really fun to be able to look at such a wide range of objects and put them in conversation with more traditional text. And I think I was able to tell a richer, more nuanced story by taking that approach.
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B
Yeah, it's a. I love the approach. This collection you just described. There so much pathos there, you know, thinking about these people going in with their items that they need for the out of doors, for being outside to have their lives, and then they just get shut up in this room because now they don't have any more external life. It was. It was concerning to think about what a fantastic trove of like, just, you know, these, like, snapshots of a life you get.
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C
Yeah. And what, What's. What's really wild to think about is I think many of these people were not told where they were going.
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D
Right.
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C
Like, they were forcibly brought by a relative or friend, neighbor, whoever, and they were probably misled as to where they were going. So they. They were packing for something else.
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D
Right.
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C
They may have just thought they were going out for an afternoon. They may have thought they were going on a vacation or to visit a family member. And then they arrive and they never leave.
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D
Right.
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C
And many of them are buried in unmarked graves, and many of them had, you know, family members that weren't checking up on them, that never came to collect their belongings once they did die. But somebody had the sense to keep those items, and I'm so grateful that they did. But it's. It's also sort of a metaphor for like, the book project, because there's a way in which looking inside a woman's purse is a sort of violation.
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D
Right.
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C
It's this intimate space that one should never enter without explicit consent.
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D
Right.
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C
And I think there's like, some sexual subtext here too.
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D
Right.
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C
And so, like, I'm actually doing that as I'm doing the research, which has this sort of meta level of I'm, in fact, violating these people, as I'm also studying the ways in which that their privacy and autonomy was. Was violated, which is a little uncomfortable.
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D
Right.
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C
So, yeah, that was really. That was like the earliest collection that I actually looked at. And I ended up talking to the Photographer who took many of the photos, created a digital exhibit, and now he's. His relationship with the museum has completely changed. And they obviously, they don't want to release the names of the patients. And so sometimes there's just like an initial or a couple letters and the rest of the name is blurred out. Which, if you look closely, I have a couple images in the book where you can see like the first letter and then maybe two. First letter of the first name and then maybe like three letters of the last name, but not the rest. And you can't even really total tell that it's blurred out, but it is.
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B
Yeah.
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C
All right.
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B
Okay. Okay. So step back from this collection, which is so compelling. Just very general question. How long have we humans been carrying our things around in bags?
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C
Forever. Literally thousands and thousands and thousands of years. You know, we have. There was a couple of. I believe they were archaeologists who discovered a corpse in a cave in Nevada. And they called the corpse the spirit caveman. And it turns out that he was even much older than they thought when they discovered him in the 1940s, he was thousands of years, something like 9,000 years old. And there were three bags perfectly intact next to his corpse, which was really amazing. And it showed that they were like weaving technologies that were much older than we had previously understood. So, I mean, as long as we've been roaming the earth, we've needed something to carry our stuff, right? And whether or not we call that a purse is a totally different matter. And there's also the issue of vocabulary, like sacks, bags, handbags, purses, pocketbooks. These are all things that refer to personal containers, but they're used differently. And some of them are more gendered than others. And some of them are more common in certain regions. Like pocketbook is much more common in the south among women over the age of, say, 50, 60, then perhaps purse. And of course, you get into chateauns and all kinds of different ways of carrying things and reticules, which were tiny little bags that were like satin and dangled from the wrist and really couldn't contain anything of, you know, any heft to the kinds of cross body bags we wear now that are designed to carry several books and a meal and a computer and all kinds of things. And the ways in which these things are gendered is also really fascinating to me. The fact that we have the word merce, this a portmanteau we have invented to describe basically a purse like object that a man carries. But you will probably be very hard pressed to find a straight cis man in the United States who refers to a bag that he carries as a purse. That word is still deeply feminized. And so you get like merse and man bag or like messenger bag.
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B
Right, yeah, right. Yeah. That's really funny. Was thinking about that. Like, I have. I will carry a crossbody, but my husband carries a messenger bag. They're the same thing, but we have these different words.
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C
Yeah.
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B
And I mean, I was just thinking, like, all of this wide variety of names, bags of different sizes and uses, is probably part of why this book needed to be written. Like the difference between a backpack and a carpet bag and a reticule, et cetera. So, I mean, a purse then is this umbrella term for something that carries things. But it's gendered.
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C
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think, like, there isn't really a need for, you know, your average sort of middle class woman to carry a bag really before the 19th century in the US at least, because she's. She's not working outside the home in a. And for wages in a way that she will probably later on.
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D
Right.
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C
She's also less likely to be living in an urban area where she might be gone for several hours of the day and then come back. And so you can sort of chart, like, this growing nation and how people are clustering and traveling and working in different ways across 200 years or so. And one of the things I did that I was not planning to do in the beginning was I talked about slavery. And the first chapter is really about the sacks that enslaved women found really clever ways to repurpose, to make. To make use of. And they certainly wouldn't have called those sacks purses. But there's a way in which they function like purses do later for women, and that they're, you know, the containers that offer them some privacy and mobility. And so I talk a lot about how enslaved women would repurpose sacks that they had received food rations in or that they were forced to pick cotton in. And they'd create, like, private pockets under their clothing, and so they could, like, steal food and everything, you know, extra things to provide comfort for their own families and their own children who weren't really being fed a nutritious diet that wasn't. That was filling.
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D
Right.
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C
And then also they used them to prepare to run away. So you might bury a sack and go out in the middle of the night and add things to it as you're planning to escape. And so that was really. That was really interesting. And I almost wondered, like, does this really belong in this, this book that's, you know, got the word purse in the title. And these are clearly not really purses. But I was really interested in the way people created women in particular created private spaces that they could take with them and how they, you know, thought of strategic ways in which to use and deploy those bags like tools.
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D
Right.
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C
And so began to think of purses or sort of proto purses, pre purses, as toolkits. There were these really highly adaptable resources for women to use in these evolving contexts and how there's ways in which women, generations of women were strategically pursuing certain goals, economic, cultural, social, political, through these bags, you know, and I think I, I and many other historians had just sort of thought of purses as a sort of fashion accessory. And I think there's a way in which even the history of fashion is still sometimes denigrated as, like, more trivial, less important than, you know, studies of war and social movements and things like that. Things like that. And I was like, well, there's ways these. All things, these are all connected, actually.
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D
Right?
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B
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I think it's notable that part of how you make, how you do this is it's not devoted to the Hermes, Birkin or a classic Chanel or even those tacky Louis Vuitton things, the numbers for sale, like knockoffs for sale in the corner, all of which could have been one of your subjects. And instead you talk about the bags that the overwhelming percentage of women use to carry their items around. And so then starting with the antebellum south and enslaved women and like, the way that they use these spaces to carve out a bit of life makes perfect sense. And then it flows. Right. Because your second chapter also deals with trying to maintain some private, unviolated space.
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C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think what's, what's also tricky is if you want to be doing material culture, but you want to be looking at, you know, women who are marginalized, minoritized, your average sort of ordinary working class woman or even middle class woman, because museums don't keep those belongings systematically.
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D
Right.
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C
You know, they tend to keep the higher end, you know, fashion designer purses or the purses of powerful famous women.
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D
Right.
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C
And I do examine some women who are famous, like Rosa Parks and Susan B. Anthony. And at the end I talk about, like, Aretha Franklin. But I really wanted to dig into what you're sort of. I mean, I hate to use the word average, because what does that mean? Average compared to what? But not famous, not powerful, not rich women and the things that they carried. And of course, the title is a sort of an homage to Tim o' Brien's book about Vietnam. I'm thinking about purses as also a kind of baggage and burden. Although I really. I was so surprised about how often purses could be used to help empower and liberate the people who carried them.
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D
Right.
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C
Which is mostly women, but I also talk about men, particularly in the last chapter where. Which talks quite a bit about gay men and their use of purses.
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D
So, yeah.
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C
It'S been. It's been really interesting and challenging because often, like I remember at the Tassel Museum, I found Margaret Thatcher's bag. And I was like, oh, this is so cool, I want to write about this. And then I was like, wait, nope, that's like the opposite of what I'm trying to do. Because there are actually a bunch of coffee table books that are glossy, highly illustrated that talk about those high end purses and fashion houses and what's. What was missing is the kind of book that I wrote which is really more about, like the use of purses and the way people thought about purses than it is. More than it is about, you know, particular brands or designers.
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B
Yeah, I'd like to Talk about Chapter 3, which focuses on women working in factories and the. Their bags. You tell me what you. What you argue here.
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C
Yeah, so in that chapter I focus on. There's a way in which each chapter is sort of a different episode or case study in American history, and it's organized chronologically. And chapter three talks about immigrant women who worked in factories, but particularly it focuses on women in New York City who worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, which of course, infamously was one of the worst workplace disasters in American history and labor history up until that point. It went up in flames in March of 1911. And it's a big deal because the death toll was 146people, 123 of which were women and girls. Many of them did not speak English and many were quite young and had only been in the States for a year or less. And the reason that the death toll was so high was because the women were actually locked inside their workplaces. They were creating shirtwaists, which were effectively like women's blouses, which was kind of like a new sort of modern, liberating item of apparel at the time because it wasn't one heavy garment. It could be sort of mixed and matched with. With other things, and it was not difficult to get on or off. And so these women are making these shirts that they're actually not even being paid enough to purchase themselves.
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D
Right.
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C
And they're being looked at with a high degree of suspicion and scrutiny by their male employers to the point where they lock the doors because they assume the women are going to be stealing things. And the mechanism for stealing, of course, the vessel that they would use is. Is their purses, right? And so purses are these threatening, disruptive objects when it comes to working women at this time. And men want to control them and see what's inside them.
- [25:58]
D
Right.
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C
And contain them. So they actually make the women, before they exit each day, they have to wait in line to have their purses. They were calling them pocketbooks examined, right. So they literally have to open them up to get past the. The guy who would inspect them, and he would look and confirm there were no ribbons or buttons or trimming thread that they were stealing. And of course, all the other doors were locked, so everyone had to go past this sort of inspector.
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D
Right.
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C
And as they're doing that, one day In March of 1911, a fire breaks out. And we actually don't know the source of the fire. It's probably something to do with someone smoking. There was, like, basically kindling everywhere, all over the floor. It was not a safe environment, even if the doors were unlocked. And so they're essentially trapped inside. And many of the women will jump to their deaths. 8, 9, 10, 11 stories. And others will burn alive inside. And some of them will throw their purses out the windows, or they'll jump with their purses, and they're just not willing to let them go. And so I. I started to research the actual fire and the trial that ensued after that and learned that these pocketbooks were really important to these women and that this forced inspection was a serious moment of humiliation and violation for them. And they kept all kinds of things in their purses, like menstrual rags, right? So, like, this is before commercially available disposable tampons or pads are accessible. And these women, even if they had existed, we probably wouldn't have been able to afford them. And so this is a really private, sacred space that they're having strange men look at against their will. And you can imagine the kinds of other things that they. They put in there. And because the. There is a criminal trial where the owners are prosecuted for neglecting these women.
- [28:05]
D
Right.
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C
For manslaughter. And they make this argument that, like, well, we actually. We didn't ever order anyone to lock the doors, but if we had, it would have been reasonable because these women use their pocketbooks to steal. And so, like, in the course of the trial, and the records of the trial were thought to be long lost. The transcript, but a partial transcript actually had been saved in the archives of, I think, one of the lawyers that people thought had been destroyed. And so those are now digitized at Cornell. You can take a look at them yourself. And purses came up over and over and over in the trial transcript. And I realized what a central role they played not only in the lives of the women workers, but also in the drama ensuing around the fire and the death of all these women. And so I just decided, there's so much here, I need to write a chapter about this. Right. And so purses are this dual, disruptive, powerful object that men want to control and women want to keep private.
- [29:09]
B
With these women in particular, I was really moved by how little private space they had in their lives.
- [29:15]
C
Right.
- [29:16]
B
They don't. They're not living in a place where they have a home or a desk or, you know, closets. Right. This is what they have.
- [29:24]
C
Yeah. And some of them are on, you know, mattress that you can roll up and then you lay out in the hallway at night. They don't have their own rooms. They don't often even have their own beds because you're not making enough money. And this is why men actually love to hire women for jobs like this, because they could pay them so much less. And they thought, oh, they have little fingers and they can get into our, you know, tidy spaces. And they all. They were also employing children.
- [29:47]
D
Right.
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C
This is before they were, you know, pretty, pretty strong, robust labor laws when it comes, when it came to children. So there are lots of little girls in this space too. Survivors end up telling their stories in the trial. It's just, it's really, it's a really sad moment in American history. But it also kind of helps you to understand their. Their perspectives and how they looked at and understood their world. When you can see how important the purse was to them, how it kept their whole life.
- [30:17]
D
Right.
- [30:18]
C
It was like a mobile home for them.
- [30:20]
B
Sure.
- [30:24]
E
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- [31:52]
B
Yeah, which is, I mean, a thing that we see like that is kind of an immigrant story as well, kind of across time space. Right?
- [32:00]
D
Yeah.
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C
And that's actually if it's okay to jump in and tell you another story. There's, that's something that I actually wanted to include in the book and didn't get to, you know, the story of thinking more about immigration and war and women in their, their bags. So there's this woman named Camilla Gottlieb who was living in Austria when the Nazis took over and she was sent to Theresienstadt, which was one of the camps. And she was a seamstress. So the Nazis kept her alive, I think, because she was making uniforms for them. She was useful to them.
- [32:43]
D
Right.
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C
But she somehow managed to keep a black leather purse with her on her forced journey to the camp while she was at the camp. And then after being liberated, she immigrated to the United States and moved in with family and she died, I think it was in the 60s. And she never talked about the war. But when she died, her family went through her closet and they found this black leather purse that she had had with her through the entire time, through World War II, right through the entire time that she was in the camp. And they found all these incredible documents like her marriage certificate, her birth certificate, like all things the Nazis would have destroyed. And she managed to keep this, like, archive documenting who she really was in her purse and literally traveled the world with it, survived a war with it. And it was. So there's actually an exhibit, a digital exhibit now several years ago that they did a physical exhibit at one of the Smithsonians called Camilla's Purse. That's all about her purse. And they, you know, digitized all the, all the papers that were inside it. And this is how her family learned her story of what she endured. And that never made it into the book. Of course. This is also. This is sort of an academic book, but also a trade book. And so I had to keep it under a certain number of words. And so otherwise I would have written a chapter about that. But I know there's much more.
- [34:13]
D
Right.
- [34:13]
C
This is just the beginning of understanding the cultural history of Perses. And I hope others will. Will do that research and think more creatively and speculatively about the role that purses have played in spaces and moments that I didn't get to think about.
- [34:29]
B
Yeah, I just made a little note to check out Camilla's purse. Thanks for that. All right, so let's jump forward to Keith Carried a clutch. Fantastic title for a chapter. Tell me what's going on here.
- [34:44]
C
Yeah, so I identify as queer and I was interested in how queer people thought about purses and carried purses. I know many lesbians who I'll describe as perseverse and I think maybe who had similar feelings to the. To the feelings I have about purses, that they were this sort of like hyper feminine object that it was almost like carrying around a pink bowl. And I was just like, oh, that's just not how I woman. I don't know that's feel natural or right to me. It feels like too much.
- [35:18]
D
Right.
- [35:20]
C
And then of course, thinking about gay men and purses, because if you're a man in America, if you carry a purse and you call it a purse, people will assume things about your sexuality, even though the objects you carry and then your sexual desires have nothing to do with each other.
- [35:38]
D
Right.
- [35:38]
C
We make those links all the time between the ways in which people express their gender through clothing and then their sexual identities.
- [35:48]
D
Right.
- [35:48]
C
And of course, sexual orientation was not always considered this fundamental definitional part of who we are, but by the time we get to the early 20th century, it is right. And like the homosexual and heterosexual have emerged as distinct entities. And this, this is an important way of understanding humans.
- [36:07]
D
Right.
- [36:08]
C
And so I started to think about the 50s, the lavender scare, when so many gay people were purged from government jobs. And some of the first, like homophile organizations were created, like the Daughters of Bilides, for example, which is formed in, in California, I believe, in San Francisco by a few white lesbian middle class couples. And they actually create dress codes for themselves. They distributed a newsletter called the Ladder, which like outlines how you're supposed to com, you know, sort of comport yourself what you're supposed to wear. And they're very concerned about looking too masculine. And so they forbid women from wearing pants.
- [36:53]
D
Right.
- [36:54]
C
And so purses become this important object that's saying that you're either gay or not.
- [37:00]
D
Right.
- [37:01]
C
Or that you're appropriately feminine or not. And so I, I found stories again about people trying to enter the United States who were for. Not allowed to enter because they were men who carried purses. Right. So it was assumed that they would be deviant, that they would be not able to earn their own incomes and that they would be, you know, you know, sort of a burden on the American system. And so they were denied entry.
- [37:31]
D
Right.
- [37:31]
C
And of course, in the 70s, we're also, you know, the 60s is sexual liberation. In the 70s, also, homosexuality is finally removed from the DSM, which is sort of the bible of psychologists and psychiatrists which defined homosexuality as a mental illness.
- [37:49]
D
Right.
- [37:49]
C
And that doesn't happen. That doesn't change, doesn't happen until 1973, 1974. And so, like, you know, border officials could say, well, we are mentally ill, so we're going to deny you entry. And we're determining categorically that you're mentally ill because you're a man who has a purse.
- [38:07]
D
Right.
- [38:07]
C
And that's considered like, hard, indisputable evidence.
- [38:12]
B
Can't argue with that.
- [38:14]
C
And then there were women who didn't carry purses who were sort of sources of suspicion because they didn't carry purses. And they were also like, to be likely to be seen as sexually deviant. And so I talk about a few cases there. And then there's also feminists who are sort of grappling with the patriarchy objects of the patriarchy, self styling and thinking about rejecting things like makeup and high heels and hosiery who might want to distance themselves from purses also. And so it's just this interesting time, particularly it focuses on the 60s and 70s, though it does go up through actually 2001, and talks about Tinky Winky. I don't know if readers are from or listeners are familiar with the Teletubbies, but there was, it was a children's show with little creatures who were not human. They didn't speak English. They just sort of had their own little baby talk. And one of them carried a red purse. And Jerry Fowell, who is the founder of Liberty University, had a. Had a. Like a newsletter that he issued and he was warning parents that Tinky Winky on the Teletubbies was modeling the gay life and that this was really dangerous and that parents should not let their children watch the show. And it was all because Tinky Wiggy carried purse.
- [39:38]
B
Was Tinky Winky a boy Teletubby?
- [39:43]
C
So they didn't really have genders.
- [39:44]
D
Right.
- [39:45]
B
But I think it's very important because probably some of our listeners are not going to remember what I recall as an abomination. But like they were not human, they were shapes.
- [39:58]
C
Yeah. They're, you know, in a way they sort of look like Barney, but they, but they weren't even a distinct species. Like they weren't a real anything. They were just sort of made up creatures and they had like television screens in their stomach being called Teletubbies. Yeah. So this was obviously this like era of hyper vigilance against, you know, anything that would be considered deviant or like homosexual esque.
- [40:27]
D
Right.
- [40:28]
C
And it's, it's tapping into those deeply rooted stereotypes about gay people being predators, pedophiles, you know, trying to recruit children. And so it's really damaging stuff.
- [40:41]
D
Right.
- [40:42]
C
But the gay community kind of reacts by like making fun of him. And so I found some, some articles and op ed pieces really just mocking him for, for thinking this. And he was sort of roundly rebuked by like the television producers were like, it's a kid show, man, you know, you gotta chill out. They're not human. But he insisted that Tinky Winky was a boy with a purse. And that's what made it so, so nuclear for him that people had to be warned away from it.
- [41:13]
B
And you know, in such a ridiculous but an interesting kind of, it's a, it's a nice way to really make this point that there's this utility to purses and there's also a self fashioning to the bag you carry. And so these are these accessories that are really worthy of consideration. They're really important cultural artifacts.
- [41:33]
C
Yeah. I talk a lot also about Marsha P. Johnson, who is a now fairly famous black trans woman who was often unhoused, housing insecure. She ran away from home after graduating from high school with a garbage bag of clothing. And so bags were really important for her as she took her various belongings with her from place to place.
- [42:03]
D
Right.
- [42:04]
C
And it's believed that at the Stonewall we call them riots. I think of it as more of a rebellion. But In June of 1969, customers, patrons at this gay bar were really sick of being harassed by the police and they actually fought back on the night of one raid. And it Lasted for a few days. And it's. I believe that Marsha P. Johnson was there, if not on the first night, on the second night, and she actually shimmied up, I believe it was a telephone pole, and dropped her bag on a police car's windshield. And she had a brick inside it, and so it smashed the windshield. And that became like, a breakthrough moment. That's. That's often talked about in queer history. And then I found evidence of other people carrying bricks in their purses, so. So it's clear that purses served as a way to sometimes symbolize and signal your sexuality at a time when that was quite dangerous to do so. But also, purses could function as, like, defensive weapons, as sort of arsenal for queer people when they were suddenly in nature.
- [43:22]
B
For all women as well, in some level or another. Your purse is. Protects you, if only from view.
- [43:29]
D
Yeah, yeah.
- [43:30]
C
And the way you hold it.
- [43:31]
D
Right.
- [43:32]
C
And you were mentioning crossbody bags earlier when. I think the reason so many. The reason so many of us carry our bags like that is because it's much harder to purse snatch.
- [43:40]
D
Right.
- [43:41]
C
To just steal a handbag off of someone's shoulder because it's now secure, like your body is part of the mechanism that's keeping it on you and actually sort of becomes like a limb.
- [43:51]
D
Right? Yeah.
- [43:54]
C
And it's where a lot of women keep their keys and pepper spray and mace and, you know, all the things we think we might need throughout the day. But also we're thinking about, like, being in different spaces alone that maybe are unfamiliar to us.
- [44:10]
D
Being.
- [44:10]
C
Being in those spaces at night and, you know, needing to clutch our bags or carry them in a way that people can't see or access our bodies.
- [44:22]
D
Right.
- [44:22]
C
So if you think about, like, public transportation and really crowded subways and sometimes people sort of, like, digitally molesting each other, women will carry their bags in ways to create space between themselves and the person, the strange person next to them, to protect their bodies.
- [44:41]
D
Right?
- [44:43]
B
Yeah. One of the. One of my takeaways, like, one of the things that I really came to think about a lot was how much we talk about women carrying bags and men don't have to. Because, you know, I've heard this argument that, well, they just have really good pockets. But a lot of the difference is that CIS men, you know, find what they need in the world, and the rest of us have to really bring it with us. Right. We may have to bring what we need with us. It's just one of those things that really struck me about this and how Much. My purse or whatever I'm carrying, you know, which sometimes is a shopping bag with my. My computer and my groceries in. It has to. Takes me through the whole world. And so I'm wondering what. What else. What should. What else do I. Should I be taking away from this book?
- [45:34]
C
Well, I think that I. I love your observation there. I think it's really astute, the idea that, like, women need resources to get through all the challenges in their lives and even thinking about not just across generations, but one woman's lifetime, right? And the things that she's going to need, especially, you know, she becomes a mother and then gets older. And I remember interviewing one civil rights activist for the book Chapter 5 is about the long civil rights movement. And I interviewed this woman who talked about prepping her bag for protests and making sure she had, you know, tampons and things she might need if she went to jail, right? And I asked her about the purses that she carries now, and she said, well, she's had a mastectomy and breast cancer, and she now carries fabric bags like those. What is it? The Vera Bradley bags that are, like, quilted and kind of cushy. And she carries a foldable cane inside it to help her get around. She's in her 80s now. And so, again, thinking about, like, the arc of one person's life and what they need in their bags with them and all the resources that we need. And perhaps men can rely on things being provided for them, right. In ways that women can't. And women are often carrying things for a whole constellation of other people, too, right? And their family, boyfriends or husbands, you know, their children, keeping them fed, occupied. Oh, you need tissues, you need hand sanitizer, you need all the things. But I think basically, you know, the message I want people to take away is to think about what's important to women, right? And let that be the guide for studying their history and taking their tools, even if they might not look like tools to us on the surface, taking them seriously, right? And thinking about the ways in which women were able to change their circumstances through something that might look trivial or mundane or totally apolitical to us today. But checking those assumptions, right? And really exploring what other roles objects might have. Of course, there's many other objects that we could think about as being important to women in different ways at different moments. And also thinking about how these objects can sometimes come to symbolize the woman's body as well, right? And I think that actually happens with the purse. That's part of how it comes. Becomes feminized as you start seeing all this marketing, particularly around the 1920s of purse size, like hygiene products for women, whether it be, you know, having a tube of lipstick you can carry with you to touch up your makeup, or having deodorizers so that your. Your body never offends anyone, and convincing women they must have all this stuff with them.
- [48:37]
D
Right.
- [48:37]
C
So there's this dual. It's like burdensome, but also a source of privacy and power. And so it's complicated. It's not like purses serve one particular purpose for all people.
- [48:47]
D
Right.
- [48:48]
C
Part of what's interesting about them is this object is so adaptable and it can serve so many different purposes. But it was important.
- [48:59]
D
Right.
- [48:59]
C
It's not trivial, it's not mundane. It's a way of understanding people and the past that I think provides new insight.
- [49:08]
D
Right.
- [49:09]
C
And really can help us anchor new understandings of ordinary people.
- [49:14]
B
All right, that seems like a very good point to kind of wrap it up. So just one more question, which is, what's next? What are you working on right now?
- [49:22]
C
Oh, that is a good question. I have several things I'm interested in. All of them have to do with gender and sexuality in America. I honestly don't know what I'm going to do next. Right now I'm sort of just still enjoying talking about the book and promoting the book. But I'm really interested in a woman named Madame Restell, who was a highly successful. People would have called her an abortionist in the 19th century. And she's really goes to jail, gets arrested as abortion is becoming criminalized in the mid 19th century. But she always gets out and just keeps doing it. She also attends live births. She's sort of a midwife. And she's hounded by Anthony Comstock, who passes the Comstock act in 1873, which basically says nothing obscene can go through the males. And it's. It's up to him to really define obscene, but he thinks anything to do with the body or sex is obscene, so he really targets her, and she ends up ending her life, completing suicide. There's one book about her and that's it. I was just thinking that's a really interesting story that also is tied to what's happening in the world right now and is really sort of important to think about in a lot of different ways. That's one possibility, but I don't know. I'm wide open.
- [50:54]
B
Oh, what a great moment. Everything's so new and shiny. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me.
- [51:02]
C
Today.
- [51:02]
B
It was an absolute joy.
- [51:03]
C
Kathleen, thank you so much for hosting me.
- [51:06]
B
All right, take care. Ciao.