As we finish talking about the contents of a purse, I thought we should touch upon coin purses.
It seems like when I was younger, anytime you traveled, there were souvenir coin purses of some sort. In a time when we carried cash money, it made sense to carry something that would hold it all. A Wikipedia article claims that coin purses have been around since about 3300 BCE. As long as there have been coins, people have needed a way to keep them together.
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| Wikimedia Commons |
When you start considering coin purses as a piece of our female ancestor's material culture, you see photos and histories of them everywhere. This 19th-century example from The Met is knitted and includes the maker's name. This Mother of Pearl version is proof that coin purses could be made from almost any material.
What was in your female ancestor's purse? Did you inherit any of it? What do you remember?
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