Purse once meant coins; handbag swallowed the rest
In North America 'purse' often means what others call a handbag: a handled, medium-to-large carryall for personal items. Historically a purse was a small coin bag, and in much of the English-speaking world it still is. The oldest handbag still in existence probably came from a fourteenth-century workshop in Iraq.
A handbag is a handled, medium-to-large bag for personal belongings. North Americans usually call it a purse, and pocketbook was the common American word in the mid-twentieth century. Purse originally meant a small bag for coins, and in many English-speaking countries it still does. The word handbag appeared in the early 1900s, at first mostly for men's hand luggage, before it attached itself to women's bags as those grew larger and more complex.
Bags themselves are ancient. Ötzi the Iceman, who lived between 3350 and 3105 BC, carried a pouch more than 5,000 years old, Egyptian burials of about 2686 to 2160 BCE have yielded leather bags with two straps, and Greeks kept coins in purses of leather, papyrus, or linen called byrsa. A royal burial at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, dated around 625 CE, held an ornate leather purse whose gold fittings outlasted the leather. The Courtauld bag, probably made at Mosul in the early 1300s for an Ilkhanate noblewoman, is thought to be the oldest handbag still in existence.
Until the late 1700s men carried purses as often as women did, and the Scottish sporran is a survivor of that custom. Late eighteenth-century taste favoured slim silhouettes borrowed from Greece and Rome, giving rise to the reticule, a silk or velvet bag on a wrist strap, while men's fashion went another way as trousers replaced breeches. The modern handbag took shape in England with railway travel: in 1841 the Doncaster butterscotch maker Samuel Parkinson ordered leather bags for his wife from H. J. Cave of London, which produced the first modern set of luxury handbags. Critics warned that such heavy bags would ruin ladies' backs, and Cave stopped promoting them after 1865.
Early handbags were attacked as unfeminine because they put on open display what dress pockets had kept hidden, and Sigmund Freud read them as sexual symbols. Over the twentieth century they turned into status objects whose brand and material could outweigh their usefulness. Textile rationing in the Second World War pushed makers toward raffia and crochet, and some women crocheted their own. European designers revived purses for men in the 1970s, and since the 1990s so-called man bags have been sold widely.
Source: Handbag
