The Performative Role of the Purse in American Visual Culture, 1890-1940

In nineteenth century portraits, women styled their hair and carefully chose their clothing and accessories as professional (generally male) photographers positioned their bodies as fashion respectable feminine subjects. Such images helped subjects construct and circulate idealized identities. In the mid-nineteenth century middle and upper class women were often photographed holding emblems of femininity such as flowers and reading materials. After 1890, however, purses often replaced such emblems, a change that represented New Women’s roles as consumers, waged workers, students, and travelers. Previously carried by both men and women, in the late nineteenth century purses helped women negotiate the changing conditions of their lives, as they packed a miniature and mobile version of the home into a small bag that helped them move between the private and public sphere. 

Using digitized photographs from a variety of archival collections, this paper will explore the performative role purses played in shaping the identities of their holders in turn-of-the-century visual culture. It will analyze professionally-produced photographs of women holding purses, contrasting these with popular illustrations of purse-holding women from newspapers, paintings, and sheet music. Based on this visual archive, I argue that purses allowed women to assert their identities as members of the public sphere and played an especially critical role for working class non-white women whose claim to respectable womanhood was most tenuous.