Here in Little Rock, Arkansas, the ESSE Purse Museum keeps women's handbags and the day-to-day items they held, small artifacts that together tell the stories of American women's lives during the 1900s. The museum's name, ESSE, comes from the Latin infinitive for "to be," a soft reminder that these small objects are full of lived experience. The museum began from the founder's interest in folk art: in 2006 her personal collection of thousands of handbags was organized into a traveling exhibition that toured the United States through 2011.
After the tour the collection found a home in a historic building in Little Rock's South Main ("SoMa") district. Inside, permanent exhibits display the purses most women owned from the early 1900s through 1999; display cases set up by decade let you read a life in buttons, receipts, photographs and coins. The labels show how war, fashion and economics shaped both style and function.
Special topic exhibits and a gift shop add color—past shows included vintage Barbie dolls in 2014 and a local artist's series of paintings of women and their purses in 2017. Picture the SoMa streetscape framing this historic building, decade by decade of purses inside.