Kathleen B. Casey offers excerpt from book about purses in Medium

Casey’s book was released in August 2025.

An excerpt from “The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America,” by Kathleen B. Casey appears in Medium, a publication of Oxford Academic. Casey, a professor of history and director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, writes about the purse in the context of civil rights, highlighting how Rosa Parks and her purse played into a larger movement. “Black and white civil rights activists both deployed purses as political tools,” she writes. “Oral histories, memoirs, diaries, monuments, and photographs reveal how they used purses in clever and creative ways to challenge existing power structures.”