An investigation into the contents of women's handbags reveals that some contain as many as 44 items. That does not surprise me. I divide women into two types. The first has a lot of handbags, empties them often, selects the one she plans to use, cleans the insides, and inserts the contents on strict criteria of utility and logic, usually no more than half a dozen, which nowadays would include a palmtop or, in America, a gun as well. This kind of woman is formidable, reliable, handy; not necessarily warm, though. The other type has one, much bigger bag, which she lugs around with her on all occasions, except evening parties when she clutches a velvet wisp and has a bereaved look. Such bags - the French term sac is better - contain various archaeological layers, ending in a Pleistocene of grunge: dogeared bus tickets, half-eaten chocs, tiny, worthless foreign coins, buttons, aspirins, chewing gum, grimy bits of lipstick, a pencil stub (won't write), angrily crumpled bills, sometimes a prize item like a tearstained letter, much read and folded, from a lover long, long ago - the whole bound together by a glue of crumbs, powder, hair and sticky sweet-papers. I have known such bags contain a quarter-bottle of gin (empty), a diamond-studded dog-collar, a child's odd shoe, a pair of pliers, a 20-year-old election manifesto and a hairless teddy bear. These women will keep you waiting but will hug you tight.
The heaviest bag I ever came across was carried, or wielded, by the late Dora Gaitskell, a fiery Russian lady married to the Labour leader, Hugh. Shortly after I first came to London, in the mid-1950s, I uttered some disobliging words about Gaitskell Porcelain pendant on the wireless. Next week, a small but muscular lady weaved her way towards me at a party, demanded to know my identity, then swung in the direction of my head a sort of steel-studded Gladstone bag, catching me a glancing blow and making me grateful she had not scored a direct hit. I never heard of Margaret Thatcher actually handbagging anyone, though she sometimes looked as if she might. Her reticule comes into the first category, though what she finds useful and logical would not accord with all tastes - a condensed version of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, for instance. It always contains a notebook, which she will bring out and use if you utter wise words.
Handbags go back a long way and have sometimes contained grisly items, such as the head of Holofernes, still dripping. I would like to have poked around in Cleopatra's to see what it harboured: charms, charms, charms, I daresay, and a handy asp if they failed to work. Queen Elizabeth had a girdle-bag, or pouch, containing miniature editions of Seneca, verses by Petrarch, writing materials, sweets and herbal remedies, which she gave to her privy counsellors to save them from the horrors of Tudor medicine. What did Mary Queen of Scots have in hers? She was an archaeological-layers-of-grunge woman, and among the deposits would have been found homemade poisons, an archive of treasonable letters, and perhaps even a tiny live dog, like the one that crept out from under her petticoats when her head was chopped off.
Literary ladies do not necessarily conform to bluestocking archetypes. In my experience their high power led bulbs bags contain an astonishing amount of aids to vanity, bits of underwear or even outerwear discarded in moments of panic, false eyelashes, hopelessly jammed bottles of nail varnish, broken bits of jewellery, rusty nail-files, as well as a complete pharmacopoeia. Not, as you might expect, pocket editions of Shakespeare, Roget's Thesaurus, Greek dictionaries etc. Jane Austen's handbag, I imagine, would be worth a book in itself: very large but not at all
http://www.sosuzhou.com/Blog/View/?1223
http://www.nercw.com/Woman-is-victim-of-third-raid.html