This will be the last of three rather idiosyncratic pieces on the great transformation of English society between 1350 and 1750.
Earlier today:
- "Age of Invention: Tudor Trade War (The true effects of Henry VII's "industrial policy")
- "The Profits of the Earth Do Not Belong to the Landlords"
We've looked at bags, pockets and the lack of same in a few posts, here's one more.
From The Yale Review, March 11, 2025:
A Unified Theory of the Handbag
Was an accessory the secret to evolution?
here is a phrase to describe the first twelve weeks of human life: “the fourth trimester.” Some mammal babies slip out of their mother’s body wrapped in their own ghost, something between alive and not—a gaunt cloud, wetting the dust. A deluge of liquid and cramped muscle, sunset-colored. Within seconds, limbs flex and cohere, the spectral casing tears (sometimes licked off by a corrugated tongue), and suddenly, slowly, there is a new creature on earth. In comparison to our fellow animals, we humans are still virtually fetal for the first few months of our lives. Always born prematurely, we depend on the parent’s body for warmth, sustenance, or any significant relocation. Our flat bones still stray, like ancient continents shuffling across cranial oceans. At birth, we can’t even lift up our own heads. We can’t look around the room, let alone lollop alongside our herd, flock, pack, or pod.
This is the price humans paid for the ability to walk on two legs, although “price” implies some conscious trade. Really, it was more like this: a small bone moved, and many lived, and many died, and then another small bone moved, and so on. Deformations repeated themselves until what was once an aberration became the norm. According to one theory of our evolutionary development, when that big toe hardened and our feet were no longer hands, the pelvis and birth canal narrowed to keep us balanced as we stood upright. Our infant heads shrank to fit through this newer, smaller opening. We became born unready, into a state of urgent needfulness. Our little thumbs couldn’t even grasp our mothers’ hairy backs; we had to be wrapped up and carried like heavy, mottled gourds, like sizable eggplants that could also scream. Scream, and learn.
The need to be carried has been used to naturalize gendered divisions of labor throughout Western culture. False histories of early human life are everywhere, spread across high-school classrooms, university departments, bestseller lists, even the familiar shorthand of “caveman” behavior in cartoons and movies. Like a nebulous fog that obscures the road ahead, these impressions merge to create a hazy wall of so-called logic, disguising hard-edged exploitation: back then, someone needed to carry the baby, and it makes sense that it would have been the body that was also in charge of feeding the baby. And if the person’s hands were busy carrying, then naturally, those that weren’t busy in such a way should have been contributing to the well-being of the group in other ways, like through hunting, protecting, discovering, inventing, adventuring, ruling. This all sounds reasonable, practically magnanimous, even communal—from each according to their ability, et cetera.
Could this millennia-old system of domination really have germinated in a logistical problem of infant immobility? Is the battle of the sexes simply a matter of full versus idle hands? The story goes: before any concept of “home,” mothers stayed with the baby, while fathers roamed. The idea that the need to be carried would propel the full-handed carrier forward into creative thought, use of tools, and expansive, collaborative relationships with the world around her has not been incorporated into the conventional narrative of how our families work.
There is a different story to be told, but it must be cobbled together from bits and pieces, glimpsed in the interstices between different styles of imagining: the scientific and the literary. The verifiable reality of our ancestors’ lives as they were conducted five to eight million years ago is not my strict concern, for obvious reasons. (Eight million years from now, I doubt our day-to-day will be fully conceivable to whatever life-form is looking back at us.) Widening the scope of what our origins may have been, nudging the frame a little wider to let in versions of family and self that remain forcefully excluded, seems more important. This rearrangement, or rearticulation, has implications for storytelling at large. The human infant’s need to be carried has been mythologized as the downfall of an entire gender, an unfortunate but unavoidable hampering of freedom and movement. But what if it could be restaged as the first act of object-based problem-solving? What if the first human tool wasn’t a weapon of some kind—a bashing stick or a sharpened stone—but a bag, to keep one hand free for the baby and another for the world?....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also:
....We left Thursday's "Commodity traders superior to chimpanzees, research shows" with the observation that any advantage commodity traders had over their simian cousins could probably be ascribed to pockets or other forms of storage:
...The report becomes particularly readable when it speculates on the reasons why [chimps are lousy traders]: because of their lack of property ownership norms...
...or, for that matter, pockets.... ...chimpanzees in nature do not store property and thus would have little opportunity to trade commodities...
Which led to:
Following Up On "Commodity traders superior to chimpanzees": The Importance of Pockets
Here is further discussion of the importance of pockets and the disadvantage society places on half its members.
From The Pudding, August 2018:
Someone clever once said Women were not allowed Pockets....
And a couple women on pocket money:
London Property Will Always Be Affordable
"The money is always there, it's only the pockets that change"-Gertrude Stein,
Also attributed to Coco Channel as:
"Money is money is money, it's only the pockets that change".
