47 Comments
Oct 13, 2022Liked by Meg Conley

I am so here for incendiary footnotes, and number 5 did not disappoint. I always come away from your writing thinking differently about things than when I started. I’m so grateful!

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Oct 13, 2022Liked by Meg Conley

What a fascinating read. That Daniel Harris was a piece of work…I would have found it very hard to be a mom, especially of small kids, without a purse. Tangentially I have often wondered what the Queen carried in her purse. She always carried one but what could she have possibly needed that her attendants wouldn’t have been ready to hand her?

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Good work, as usual (I subscribe). But not enjoyable. I'm not sure whether the parable of the purse or Harris's misogyny is more disturbing. Harris is so extreme I can almost laugh him off. The parable of the purse hits close to home.

When you write "There is no Parable of the Pocket. Men are never reduced to what they carry." the first sentence is true to my knowledge, but the second sentence may warrant a footnote for Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried." It's well known in my circles and an important read for me personally, the title chapter has been anthologized, and the book is now showing up on banned book lists making it newly interesting.

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My partner, a historian, calls purses "oppression bags." His theory is that as women moved out of the home and into the public sphere, purses were meant to be a reminder of the obligations of home and care work. And this seems at least somewhat likely--couture has always been a male-dominated industry.

Purses can be baggage, but they can also be dangerous. Many a woman has been grabbed or strangled by her purse straps. And how many of us carry our partners' detritus, because it "doesn't fit in their pockets?"

Maybe it's time we take back OUR pockets.

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This article is worth a paid subscription! I grew up in a household where my dad taught me about car maintenance and my my mom taught my brothers to sew. No task in the house would be relegated to just one sex. My brother used his sewing skills to solve the “no room in the pockets” dilemma by sewing compartments into his shirt sleeves to carry his knives (yes- knives plural!) I love the former practice of women’s clothing having hidden pockets. I find that my clothing choices always include well placed pockets so I don’t have to carry a purse. Not for sexual freedom reasons (!!) but for personal safety.

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Oct 14, 2022Liked by Meg Conley

This was wonderful. Thank you.

If clothing manufacturers would just GIVE US GOOD POCKETS!!! I mean, why are there memes about someone commenting how pretty a dress is and the woman saying "Thanks, it has pockets!"

Two of my nieces ended up choosing their wedding gowns because they had pockets. I don't know that women WANT to carry purses but how else are we supposed to carry our driver's license, credit card, cash and chap stick/lipstick? You could put it in your bra but....

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i love this, especially footnote 5--good GRIEF! The story told by LDS leaders of the purse and womanhood... ugh just so enraging. When will we not have white men in thrall to ideals of victorian empire?! ugh.

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It was the joke about how many times Harris asked a girlfriend to carry his stuff in her purse for me :)

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Oct 14, 2022Liked by Meg Conley

As a lover of purses (I think by the time I was 16, I had about 20 different kinds), I loved this essay. I think about the things I carried in those purses and how they meant so much to me, and how the stage of my life looks now with the diaper bag I carry. I have a small purse for when I’m going somewhere without my children, but because it took a lot to get my children here, I like the heft of the diaper bag—for what it means to me. Lots of thoughts to tease through because of this essay. Excellent writing, as always.

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Oct 14, 2022Liked by Meg Conley

Thank you a zillion times over for naming the amount of time it takes to write and describing each component. Like really - THANK YOU. Thanks for naming the work of it, the craft of it and the damn time it takes.

and...”ink that slid across the paper like frosting” made me smile so hard. Dude - fabulous description!

and, I totally enjoyed thinking about what’s in my purse (the wine bottle opener in the same side pocket as the pepper spray?!).

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Oct 14, 2022Liked by Meg Conley

The competing urges when my husband asks whether I have something in my bag - to scream "why don't you carry a bag if you think our kid will need snacks, rather than assume I have it covered" -- and simultaneously feeling so proud of past-me for remembering to pack snacks, to have a bag big enough to hold them, and organized enough for them to be found. conflict abounds in my head and my heart!

And the delight of just carrying my little cross body when I am going out alone.

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Oct 14, 2022Liked by Meg Conley

Oof. Cook's talk. Yikes. Somehow I missed that one, but that was also the era of Julie Beck's "Mother's Who Know", that one talk about the father going with out lunch for a year so he could by his wife a pressing machine to make it easier for her to iron all the shirts for the men in the family, even though she was in so much pain from cancer, and Elaine S. Dalton....being Elaine S. Dalton.

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Oct 14, 2022Liked by Meg Conley

I think you could write a whole article about why men think carrying a small bag is not manly. My adult gay son carries a small cross body bag with him at all times. It was so refreshing one day when we were at a restaurant and he reached in his bag, pulled out a small hand santizer and passed it to me. I felt the full circle of caring from our "purses" had come around.

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I graduated high school in 1989. That makes me 51 now. But it's funny how your 14 year old purse and my 51 year old purse are so similar.

I currently have 3 glitter gel pens (these Pentel Arts Krazy Pop Iridescent Gel Pen at 1.0mm Bold Line are AMAZING from https://amzn.to/3T5mq2j), 2 tortoise shell barrettes to try and control the red curls, my phone holds my music now instead of a CD, 3 Beautycounter lip glosses and my favorite autumn L'Oreal lipstick (#839 Cinnamon Toast), my pink sunglasses with mirrored lenses (now RX ones - but when I heard Miranda Lambert's Pink Sunglasses song I had to have a pair), my red wallet from Levenger, and lastly my flowered spiral bound notebook. Are we sisters from another mother? :)

I'll also tell you about your Dad's receipt what I told my Mom who keeps in her wallet the original note left on the last bouquet of flowers my dad gave her before he died...........make a copy and keep that one in your wallet. Put the original one away. She would be bereft if she lost the original or someone stole her purse/wallet.

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Oct 14, 2022Liked by Meg Conley

So, I am friends with the mother of the girl whose purse was found. The family is in my stake and for a while I was in the stake YW presidency, but after this incident happened. Sedgewick's wife was the stake YW pres for a neighboring stake, so not this girl's actual leader. Not that it matters. I know the women who were looking through that purse. They made their callings their full-time jobs. I'm a writer, which, as you know, has to be a full time job to be profitable. I also subbed high school to supplement our income because, as you know, writing doesn't really pay all that well (especially when you write for a Church-adjacent publisher, which I did at the time). My church job couldn't be my full-time job, but the expectation was that it would be, especially when there were big multi-stake activities like the one where this purse was found. Stake YM leaders often couldn't put in the same amount of time because they had, you guessed it, jobs. For years I haven't been able to put my finger on why this purse parable bothered me. I thought maybe it was because my daughters' purses (when they carry them) would NEVER have recipes and FSOY pamphlets (my oldest tore hers to pieces after reading it) and all the other things that make a girl "virtuous." They know how to bake, but they also know how to earn money doing it. I wasn't raised to think of "homemaking" as the highest ideal I could strive for, and I never wanted my girls to feel that way either. I taught them to honor & respect the women who do and that they could make that choice if they want, but they don't have to. All of this is a long way of saying, thank you for articulating why that purse story never resonated with me. Also, I adore Katie Porter and campaigned for her before redistricting took her away from me. I hated seeing the Sedgwick signs knowing we shared the same religion but were miles apart in how we apply its precepts in our own lives, yet he's what people think of when they think Mormon. Anyway, this is a very long way of saying I loved this article. It resonated with me so much more than the parable of the purse ever has.

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Oct 15, 2022Liked by Meg Conley

Loved this piece so much. (And you crushed it with Canva!) Thanks for this, Meg.

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