Featured Image: Arkansas Tourism
There are things you expect to find in Little Rock, Arkansas. Central High School, one part national park and one part functioning public high school, where nine courageous teenagers helped change the course of American history. The Presidential Center, where former president Bill Clinton’s legacy is preserved. And of course, the Arkansas River, which flows quietly through downtown, dividing Little Rock from its sister city of North Little Rock on the opposite shore. A feminist history museum told through the lens of handbags? That one tends to catch people off guard.
And yet, tucked into the SoMa district along South Main Street, a neighborhood that has itself pulled off one of the more remarkable second acts in recent Southern urban history, sits the Esse Purse Museum. For decades, the construction of Interstate 630 carved a hard line through the city, effectively cutting South Main off from downtown and leaving the once-thriving street to languish. It was Esse Purse Museum owner and curator, Anita Davis, who began to change that, first with the neighborhood’s Bernice Garden in 2006 and later with the museum itself.
It is the only museum of its kind in the United States, with just two other comparable institutions in the entire world (the Tassenmuseum in Amsterdam and the Simone Handbag Museum in Seoul). Since opening in 2013, Esse has quietly become a must-visit museum for history buffs and fashion aficionados alike. The name, after all, is Latin for ‘to be,’ a fitting choice for a museum devoted to a century of American womanhood.
The Esse Purse Museum began humbly with 250 purses from Davis’s personal collection, but today it has over 500 artifacts on display. It spans the full arc of the twentieth century, from 1900 to 1999, tracing one hundred years of the American woman through the objects she chose to carry close to her body. A purse is not just an accessory. It is a container for a life: the lipstick, the grocery list, the car keys, the checkbook, photos of loved ones, and later the cell phone. What a woman carries speaks volumes about her era. Decade by decade, the Esse collection tells that story with remarkable specificity, all thanks to showcasing handbags.
There are more than a few fascinating pieces on display, including the telephone handbag, a purse fitted with a working telephone receiver, produced by Dallas Handbags in the 1970s. It has been dubbed, with some affection, the “original mobile phone,” a reminder that the impulse to carry our communications with us is not as new as we like to think.
At just ten dollars for admission, the Esse Purse Museum is also one of the great cultural bargains of the South. It takes about an hour to tour, and it ends, ever so cleverly and poetically, in a purse-and-accessories shop. Temporary special exhibits are also displayed quarterly; past rotations have included exhibits devoted to Barbie, voting rights, and eyewear.
Visit the Esse Purse Museum, located at 1510 Main Street, Tuesday through Sunday. And who knows? Maybe one day, someone will be observing the contents of your handbag through museum glass.
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