"The Purse and the Person" brings together life stories buried right under our noses - in the purses carried by our mothers and grandmothers. Developed from a private collection of over 3,000 purses and accessories, this exhibition looks at purses from the inside out, examining day-to-day life reflected in a very personal, very female artifact cache - a woman's handbag. In the mysterious depths of their purses, women reveal their personalities, their fashion sense, and the everyday concerns that populate their lives. What is their image of themselves? What items do they carry to help bolster that image? What do they do outside the home where their purse becomes their tool kit for interaction with the world around them? How do they get around in that world and who goes along with them? What obstacles do they face each day that might require them to identify themselves, communicate about themselves, or even protect themselves? With only the contents of a grandmother's purse to go on, what kind of detailed profile would a forensic scientist draw? Or, the profiler a curious grandchild whose picture of grandma always includes the magical bag of surprises she carries? As visitors look at what's inside the purses and discover these personalities, they will find familiar objects from purses that they've known as well as objects whose purpose has long since faded. There are curiosities like the combination phone dialer and address book whose handy, rounded tip spared many a manicure from the rigors of rotary dial telephones. There are objects as ubiquitous as lipsticks where it may be hard to imagine a time before they showed up in our purse. And, there are objects like cigarette lighters where it once seemed impossible to think they might disappear from our purses. While some women may be defined by what is inside their purses, others may be interpreted by what's not. The rouge pot of a 1920's flapper denoted youth and freedom, while the absence of make-up may be an expression of freedom for the counter-culture youth of a later generation This exhibit consists of 100 purses and 100 artifacts and photographs as revealing as any travel journal or postcard.