For many women, their handbag is more than something to carry their make-up – it’s their whole life in a leather cocoon. So what do handbags say about their owners and are they really a potent symbol of women’s emancipation, writes FIONOLA MEREDITH
FOR SOME WOMEN, it provides a simple way to carry a purse, mobile phone and keys, along with a random assortment of everyday bits and pieces. But for others, the handbag is much more than that. Media commentator Yasmin Alibhai Brown may have been only slightly overstating it when she observed that handbags have become potent symbols of “politics, economics, social mobility, pre-feminist proclivities or post-feminist liberties, ethical living, advanced capitalism, the ebb of socialism and possibly the end of history”.
Now French sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann has written a book – Le Sac, un Petit Monde d’Amour (or The Bag, a Small World of Affection) – examining the contents and the meanings of the female handbag. Having interviewed 75 women over the course of 18 months, Kaufmann concludes that, despite its frivolous image, the handbag is actually a symbol of female emancipation.
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