The power of the purse or the wallet
Each time my spouse referred to his wallet as a ‘purse’ it would annoy me no end. To him it was a matter conveying the message to his old mother in Tulu and it did not make a difference whether he called it a ‘purse’ or a ‘wallet’. The last argument between us was on how one should not ‘genderise’ these essentials. The one hamster wheel I have been avoiding…..where we talk about gender equality, why should I get into gender distinctions of words?
This small bag that we women use and the one that we refer to as the ‘purse’ has remained with us women for ages. Perhaps this is one reason why as a woman I realised women have grown possessive about it. As a teenager, I would sit back and devise of ways to carry some knick knacks to a party without having to worry about the purse.This small bag used for holding money, make up, the handkerchief, tickets and the list could go on…..gradually became an integral part of my life. I feel lost when I walk out of the house without clutching a purse or slinging a handbag. The only time I walk out of the house without it, is when I am sure I have enough pockets on the clothes worn to stash my belongings. I remember my English teacher defining a ’Clutch wallet’ as the term for the wallet used by women and ‘wallet’ as the term used by men. All that was force fitted into the young mind, when ‘gender’ was taught at school as part of grammar lessons.
My grandmother would laugh at us when we would cling to the bag we carried. Her argument would be that we women should walk swaying our hands free. The argument of the utilitarian value of the purse especially when it came to money, would have her scorn at us. She would go on to tell us about the saree blouse worn by women and of how safely valuables and money could be tucked in the blouse or the upper garment worn by women. The talk always ended with the peasant woman who believed in hemming the purse onto the inside of the sari skirt where she could hide away the money she saved for her family. This was true of how she would talk about men too. Men would tuck money in the pockets of the shorts that they wore beneath the lungi or the mundu. Thereafter she would end it with a gaffe at how the men did not have the finesse like women.
During the early eighties, I remember coming across men who carried purses too. Tucked under the arm, the men had specially designed pouches which would hold essentials like papers, money, handkerchief and at times the betel leaf and arecanut too. Gradually as they migrated to wearing only trousers and shirts, they gave up the habit of carrying the purses and the pockets were brought to great use. The trend was also in the early eighties to wear shirts with four pockets and trousers with four pockets too. Women were not to be left behind, as they started hemming pockets into their salwars, kurtas and also saree skirts had a pocket lining the waist. However, the purses and wallets could not be defunct and gradually wallets evolved for men while women with the advancement of dresses started using handbags and purses that could sling on their shoulders. In the movies of the seventies, you see the men carrying these bags too as man-purses. Women started carrying a lot more of their belongings in the purse and hence the sizes of these purses varied over time. Luxury brands in modern times has made these purses indispensable in the couture of the woman.
In the middle ages purses were made out of leather with drawstrings, girdle pouches hung at the waist of the dressing of man or woman. Chatelaines, waist pouches, hand bags, clutch bags and some of the old fashioned purses are in vogue today. What is encouraging as you watch the society today are the ‘genderless bags’ that we carry everyday to work, be it the laptop, the make up, the currency, a pair of clothes….the versatility of the purse has grown beyond imagination.
Well if fashion has traversed this path, wonder what made me comment on the wallet and the purse……is it the individuality of the woman that we grew up being possessive about, the pride of independence and liberation, the social security, the distribution of largesse to the family, the privacy or simply the style statement that we women make with our purses? To me as a woman, the purse symbolises all of that and more ….
