The things she carried : a cultural history of the purse in America / Kathleen B. Casey.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Casey, Kathleen B., author.

Series:

Oxford scholarship online.

Oxford scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Handbags--United States--History.

Handbags.

Handbags--Social aspects.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (241 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2025]

Summary:

'The Things She Carried' reveals how bags, sacks, and purses provided the methods and materials for Americans' activism, allowing carriers to transgress critical boundaries at key moments. It explores how enslaved people used purses and bags when attempting to escape and immigrant factory workers fought to protect their purses in the workplace. It also probes the purse's nuanced functions for Black women in the civil rights movement and explores how LGBTQ people used purses to defend their bodies and make declarations about their sexuality.

Contents:

"This sack so full": Enslaved women's use of bags in Antebellum America

Purses and pathbreaking women at the turn of the century

Space, privacy, and the pocketbooks of working women

The bag and the body: Purses and personal hygiene, 1920s-1940s

Pickets, protests, and purses in the civil rights movement

"Keith carried a clutch": Queer communities and purses in the late twentieth century.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource and publisher information; title from PDF title page (viewed on May 6, 2025).

ISBN:

0-19-758785-2

0-19-758783-6

0-19-758784-4

OCLC:

1460455088