Journalist Dorothy Roe

Among the many journalists referred to in "Pain in the Purse" is Dorothy Roe. In her fashion column, she wrote about how to avoid the tax by either crafting your own bag or buying a really good leather one that would last. Dorothy Roe also wrote the 1961 book "The Trouble with Women is Men." In it she quotes magazine editor John Fischer as theorizing, among other things, in his August 1958 article "The Non-Sexual Behavior of the Human Female," that women are "deciduous," and they shed "gloves, lipstick, handbags and handkerchiefs as a tree sheds leaves, while men spend their lives picking up after them!"

This cavalier attitude about women and their supposed bad behaviors was not Fischer's alone. "Pain in the Purse" cites similar instances of flippancy among male writers and politicians with regard to the handbag tax.

Dorothy Roe's 1961 book, from the collection of Wendy Dager/The Vintage Purse Museum.