When Lucy
Locket lost her pocket, it was a garment separate from her other clothes,
worn tied around her waist under her outermost layers. Women began to wear
pockets such as these, as opposed to pouches or bags hanging outside their
clothes, during the late seventeenth century. Separate pockets continued
to be worn into the mid nineteenth century, when women's dresses began to
be made with sewn-in pockets as they are today.
A woman's pocket was the place she kept handy the items she used regularly,
such as her spectacles and handkerchief, keys, money, sewing tools, or knitting.
It was also her most private storage space, for some women perhaps the only
private space they had, so a pocket might contain more intimate objects
such as personal letters.
Museum collections of decorative arts, such as the SPNEA collection, often
contain a variety of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century pockets, some
beautifully decorated with embroidery, needlepoint, appliqué, or
patchwork. Pockets were most likely not intended to be seen when worn, and
most pockets were probably plain fabric. The decorated ones represent an
attempt on the part of women to beautify their everyday lives. Pockets were
also given as gifts. Decorated pockets are more likely to have survived
than plain ones, as they would have been saved for sentimental reasons.
While many pockets, plain and ornamented, survive in museum collections,
it is difficult to know precisely how they were worn. The pocket was so
symbolic of a woman's privacy that whenever one appears in a painting or
print, its appearance has to be read more in terms of its symbolic value
than its actual use. Most period illustrations that show a woman's pocket
depict the woman engaged in behavior that is suggestive of either eroticism
or business activities or both.
Pockets thus represent the kind of dilemma that objects of material culture
can present to scholars. Much is known about how and when these items
were made, but evidence of how they were used remains fragmentary and
tantalizing. From objects of the most mundane function to articles of
highest symbolic value representing how society saw women and how women
saw themselves, pockets were and continue to be powerful images of womanhood
in early America.
-Sharon Ann Burnston
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Top Left:
The size and shape of pockets have befuddled many people in the past.
When this pocket was donated to SPNEA in 1942, it was described as a pear-shaped
linen shoe bag. Shown here with an eighteenth-century handkerchief, coins
and pair of spectacles, it more clearly reveals its function. Below:
This pocket from Dover, New Hampshire, was embroidered with the initials
"HB," a practice in keeping with the marking of other undergarments
and household linens with the owner's initials. It holds an enameleed
memorandum book.
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