10 new york | july 22–august 4, 2019
Appalachian Trail? In my large tote, I always have make-
up, magazines, tissues, and a wallet the size and weight
of a brick. Usually I also carry my lunch, a Kind bar, an
extra plastic bag in case I need to walk the dog, an extra
fold-up tote in case I need to go to the grocery store, and
sometimes also an umbrella, a sweater, yoga clothes, a
water bottle, and an extra pair of shoes. Jane Birkin ulti-
mately got tendinitis in her shoulder, perhaps the price of
feeling she had to be prepared for every raindrop and
spill. In Elle, Julia Felsenthal described how her “fancy
fashion magazine editor handbag” messed up her upper
back. Nearly every woman I asked described the casting
off the burden of all her stuff as something like bliss, in-
cluding one writer who spoke of her purseless experience
in almost spiritual terms. “I do it to be free,” she DM’d me
on Twitter. “To walk fully. After you carry a bag and then
you don’t, you feel like you can fly.”
The male purse went out of fashion more than 300 years
ago, but the spilling subway woman called to my attention
the number of men who ride the train carrying absolutely
nothing. I dated one such man, who used to say that schlep-
ping things was bad for the soul. Since the spill, I notice
them all the time—in particular, on my way home one night,
a tall, dark-haired Italian model-type man in a super-slim
suit and long, narrow shoes who seemed not to have room
on his person for an extra credit card, let alone a stack of
paper towels cadged from the bathroom at work, just in
case. He looked like he believed he was Important, and
maybe he was. The message encoded in empty spaces where
a briefcase or a backpack might have been was this: I have
people to carry things for me. Golf caddies. Bellhops. As-
sistants. Women.
Freedom from having to carry stuff is power, and as with
so many aspects of being female, a woman’s spill steward-
ship is rife with mixed messages. On the one hand, be pre-
pared! On the other hand: Purge, declutter! A messy house/
body/person reflects a disorganized—and possibly even
psychologically diseased—mind. There is a small industry
online bent on making female messiness a pathology. A new
study shows that visitors to a disorderly home will judge the
female inhabitant if they believe she’s responsible for the
mess but give the male inhabitant a pass.
The job of cleaning up metaphorical spills frequently
falls to women, too. It’s not just that most nursery-school
teachers—those who get paid to mop up juice and milk
and more than occasionally pee—are women; it’s that
most communications professionals are women, too.
Public relations is overwhelmingly women’s work:
They’re left to spin, explain, and clear up the gaffes, mis-
takes, and malfeasances of the (mostly male) people in
charge. Nowhere is this clearer than in Trumpland, where
women are deployed to tidy after a president who resem-
bles a rhetorical Pig-Pen. The writer Virginia Heffernan
noted this tendency of sending in the females—Sanders,
Hicks, Conway—to mop up in a brilliant essay in the L.A.
Times. Trump has often treated his former press secre-
tary Sarah Huckabee Sanders “as if she were the posses-
sion of her father, Mike Huckabee, on loan to him as a
scullery maid,” Heffernan wrote. Which inevitably evokes
the mental image of Hicks, who during the 2016 cam-
paign literally carried a steamer with her at all times in
order to help her most-vulgar candidate maintain a ve-
neer of neatness. Did she carry the steamer in her Vuitton
bag? Another strong argument for pockets. ■are. Their explanation mirrored my thinking: Perhaps
mothers rush to clean stuff up to protect their progeny
from contaminants. Even women without children un-
dergo a lifelong acculturation toward motherhood, which
prompts us to carry rags and burp cloths in our bags. (Or
maybe, as humans who menstruate, we simply learn early
to be ever vigilant against accidents.)
A friend of mine, a women’s-history professor, had a dif-
ferent idea. Women clean up because fashion allows it. She
pointed to the size of women’s bags, which allows us—like
Sherpas or packhorses—to lug around the tool kits of servi-
tude. A woman is expected to be prepared for every eventu-
ality, and culture has formalized that expectation. Online,
lists of necessities proliferate: 12, 14, 17, 19, 30 things a
woman should keep in her purse. Almost all include tissues,
breath mints, hand sanitizer, and tampons—but also “a con-
dom, because this is her responsibility, too.” (A woman’s re-
sponsibility for everyone else’s spills extends to the most
primal level.)
But this is all relatively new. In ancient times, purses were
a male accessory because carrying money was a man’s job;
women didn’t need bags because they didn’t venture far
from home. Taxpaying and, later, alms-giving and debt-
settling made a necessity of the small pouches that men
wore on strings close to their bodies, the precursors to the
money belt. In the Middle Ages, women hung a few small
precious objects from a girdle around their waists: a rosary,
a pomander, a religious book. It wasn’t until the Renaissance
that women’s massive skirts allowed them to cache the stuff
they needed in large pockets that dangled beneath their
clothes. By the 1700s, they had “work bags,” nominally for
knitting or needlepoint but also called “everything bags” be-
cause they could contain, according to the Berg Encyclope-
dia of World Dress and Fashion, a cornucopia of necessities:
a fan, smelling salts, makeup, opera glasses.
Around the time of the French Revolution, women’s sil-
houettes grew slimmer and bulging interior pockets were
seen as an impediment to style. Instead, women were en-
couraged to carry their stuff in a small bag on a string called
a reticule. The Rational Dress Society, founded in the 1880s,
arose along with the burgeoning suffrage movement; its
adherents argued that female independence could not be
achieved in a tight-fitting, pocketless dress. True liberation
required loose-fitting clothing that allowed freedom of
movement—and pockets for keeping necessities close, in-
cluding a revolver, if necessary.
But fashion won, and after the turn of the 20th cen-
tury, when it became increasingly permissible for wom-
en to travel alone, luggage designers like Louis Vuitton
began peddling large handbags for women, positioning
their wares as a signal of female independence. With
compartments and clasps, they promised privacy and
exuded competence. Needless to say, such luxuries were
available only to wealthy women who could afford to
travel on an ocean liner. In the 1970s, the actress Jane
Birkin was famous for carrying her stuff in an open-top
farm basket until an executive at Hermès named a bag
after her. In a recent TV segment, Birkin opens her
eponymous tote. “Girls like to have masses of things in
their handbag,” she says charmingly as she paws through
the credit-card holders, extra pairs of glasses, lotion, and
baubles. “Everything’s useful.”
But what’s independent about being so useful, so en-
cumbered, as if every trip to the office were a trek on the
intelligencer
The Handbag
Through
HistoryLate 1700sMiddle Ages1700sPHOTOGRAPHS: FLORILEGIUS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; CULTURE CLUB/GETTY IMAGES; TIME LIFE PICTURES/MANSELL/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES