Today’s Prompt #26: Pocketbook
Some personal items and spaces are more private than others. You can open someone’s kitchen drawers looking for a spoon or check a cupboard in the bathroom for tissues without most people thinking you are invading their privacy. The medicine cabinet is borderline since a person might want aspirin or a bit of floss, but it is also the place that most people who snoop would feel free to open. Prescription medications and personal products tell stories. The same person would probably not open the more personal bedroom drawers and closets. But to open someone’s pocketbook, even if looking for tissues or a pen, without asking feels like a violation.
The word “pocketbook” implies a kind of physical proximity. One’s pockets are usually sitting right next to the skin. Originally, women’s pocketbooks actually went in large pouches that were called “pockets” and hung from a special belt worn underneath the outer layers of clothing. Those garments had slits on the side so that a woman could slip her hands inside. They were undergarments and another person reaching in to them would mean putting hands inside her clothing, likely copping a very private feel in the process. The term, “pocketbook,” retains this sense of its contents being within the physical sphere of personal space and inviolate.
The more common term these days is “purse.” To me, it has associations mainly with the disbursement of funds and not the hidden suggestiveness of hidden secrets. Looking in someones purse feels like a potential theft, as we would assume that doing so places the money there at risk. Looking in a pocketbook carries a different suggestion of inquisitiveness, of trying to learn secrets about the woman, and is a personal violation rather than a pecuniary one.
