Kathleen B. Casey's "The Things She Carried"

Kathleen B. Casey is Director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and Professor of History at Furman University in South Carolina. She is the author of The Prettiest Girl on Stage is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville.

Casey applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America, and reported the following:

If you open up The Things She Carried to page 99, you’ll likely be surprised to find a large advertisement from 1937 for Tampax tampons. The ad was published in Good Housekeeping and includes a black and white photograph showcasing a woman’s manicured fingers slipping a box of Tampax into the mouth of her purse. At the time, tampons were brand new products with which consumers were unfamiliar. Because advertisers were reluctant to show the actual product or discuss its use, they relied on more discrete images of their boxed products being placed inside women’s purses. The partial paragraph at the bottom of this page notes how terms like pocketbook and purse had become so associated with women’s bodies in the 1940s that, in some cases, they began to serve as euphemisms for women’s genitalia.

Because page 99 is almost entirely occupied by an image and it reflects one of six chapters exploring very different angles of the cultural history of the purse, it would likely intrigue and surprise readers more than represent the book as a whole. When most people think about purses, they think of fashion, but they don’t imagine how purses might be connected to women’s history and the invention of purse-sized personal hygiene products like tampons. This chapter of my book, “The Bag and the Body,” helps to explain why purses became increasingly linked to womanhood and femininity, to the point where American men now often shrink at the idea of touching a purse, nevermind carrying one of their own. The book is really about how purses are these seemingly mundane, ubiquitous objects that we have really underestimated. In reality, they were powerful toolkits strategically used by several generations of women across two centuries of American history.

In a way, the Page 99 Test works because this book is full of rather unexpected stories, connections, and images, which place the purse in surprisingly important roles in American history. Page 99 represents that quite well.

Visit Kathleen B. Casey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue