What We Carry

I know what's in my purse (old receipts, a maxed out credit card and some stale crackers). But hearing what other women carry in their bags gives me inspiration. You carry a sewing kit, tweezers and a mini umbrella? Excellent! It sounds like you're ready for anything. Admittedly, I'm a little weird, but I'm not alone in my purse preoccupation. Women's magazines detail the exact contents of celebrities' purses (e.g. $30 tubes of lip balm, seaweed gummy bears and pictures of their dogs). Clearly, I'm not the only one interested in what other women are lugging around in their handbags.

But, as countless men have wondered, why do women carry so many things in their purses and do we really need all that stuff? Statistics suggest that if you're a female in the United States, you carry a purse loaded down with so many "essentials" you're giving yourself back problems. Still, we load up our purses because we like to be prepared. When we have the perfect solution for a problem right in our very own handbags, it makes us feel like we've accomplished something. Perhaps even staved off an impending disaster, armed only with our mini lint rollers, Kleenex and breath mints.

But for all our honorable intentions, the content of our purses is teetering on the brink of insanity. The average American woman carries 67 items in her purse. That's a lot of eye liner, anti bacterial lotion and hair spray! Our handbags (weighing between 5 and 20 pounds) carry lots of useful notions, but they also exact a toll on our bodies and minds.

Doctors link our heavy purses to an epidemic of migraines, back pain and spinal misalignment in women. Sadly, many of us are fully aware that our over stuffed bags are wreaking havoc on our health and personal lives. Let's not even discuss the fact that some purses cost as much as a used car. Yet consumer trends indicate we're not giving up our super sized satchels anytime soon. Trend spotters suggest that every year, women are buying bigger and more expensive purses, and filling them with more and more stuff. So what's going on? Do we really need to haul around half the house in our purses, or is there something deeper going on?

Women didn't always carry duffel bags around on a daily basis. Our grandmother's handbags were barely large enough to contain some cash, perhaps few mints, a lipstick, comb and a compact and they were ready to go. But somewhere between our grandmother's diminutive bags and our super-sized Mary Poppins purses stocked with half of Walgreens, something has gone off the rails. Could our super sized purses symbolize a more serious emotional issue for today's hyper stressed, exhausted-to-the-core modern woman?

If we compare our purses (and lives) to our grandmother's, the size, cost and weight of our bags suggest that we're upsizing, stressing and maxing out our minds and bodies with our enormous purses. But our grandmothers didn't just have smaller purses. They drove smaller cars (if they drove at all), lived in smaller houses and had fewer kitchen appliances. They washed their faces with soap (gasp!), and were ready to leave the house in the morning with a little blush and lipstick.

Their lives were simpler in many ways, but they were certainly not easier. Our grandmothers struggled. They wondered how they would feed their families during the Great Depression and if their children would survive the polio epidemic. While we fret about whether or not to vaccinate our children or give them antibiotics, our grandmothers worried that a sore throat or fever could mean death.

It dishonors our grandmothers to equate their comparatively simple lives to a rosy vintage cliche. While it is true that their lives were simpler and less cluttered, it must also be said that they did not always choose simplicity- simplicity chose them, because of scarcity, economic and social hardships and the harsh realities of being a woman in a world that belonged to men.

Yet, despite the challenging times in which they lived, our grandmothers were generally quite happy. Happy with the simple gifts of a healthy baby, a Sunday table, clean clothes. They reveled in their freedom to attend school, and receiving a new dress was a true occasion.