Author Kathleen B. Casey presents her new book The Things She Carried, a cultural and social biography of the purse. In conversation with feminist writer Emily Taylor, she'll explores how and why purses became intimately linked with evolving understandings of gender, travel, waged work, and modernity.

The Things She Carried reveals how bags, sacks, and purses provided the methods and materials for Americans' activism, allowing carriers to transgress critical boundaries at key moments. It explores how enslaved people used purses and bags when attempting to escape and immigrant factory workers fought to protect their purses in the workplace. It also probes the purse's nuanced functions for Black women in the civil rights movement and explores how LGBTQ people used purses to defend their bodies and make declarations about their sexuality.

Kathleen B. Casey is Director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and Professor of History at Furman University in South Carolina. In addition to her new book, The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America, she is also the author of The Prettiest Girl on Stage is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville.

Emily Taylor is Professor of World Literature and director of Women's and Gender Studies at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon and has published essays in Caribbean-Irish Connections, The Journal of West Indian Literature, The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, The Southern Quarterly, and most recently in the Cambridge series Caribbean Literature in Transition. She writes the newsletter Hot Feminism: Letters from South Carolina.