The String Bag – a Brief Social History

‘The string bag is the symbol of feminine bondage in Australia’. Thus spoke US consul Mr T.C. Robinson at a conference of the NSW Agricultural Bureau in 1950. He advocated a reorganisation of food distribution (which eventually led to supermarkets and shopping malls), better laundry and dry-cleaning services, and modernised kitchens. Robinson stated that when it came to shopping, housewives in America achieved in one hour what took Australian women six hours.

Trudging home. 😨

Source – Sun Herald (Melbourne)

A more simplistic explanation for Australian  women’s shopping woes  was that delivery services had not returned to normal following the manpower shortages of WWII. Technically, the ban on home deliveries ended in October 1945, but business owners were only too happy to let their customers keep lugging everything home themselves. 😎

Permitted, but customers remained the carriers. (Source SMH. October 6 1945)

WAR – WHEN EVERYONE BECAME A ‘BAG LADY’

The humble string bag had become a symbol of great social  change  during the war years;

In those good old days before  the  war, to carry a string bag bulging with parcels was considered rather bad form, but now no-one from the highest to the lowest in the land, dreams of venturing out without this faithful, capacious, and ever-ready friend-in-need.  The smartest women whip string bags from their elegant handbags like conjurors producing rabbits from a hat….stores must be lugged home by the mother of a family, and the smart dweller in an up-to-date flat alike. Manpower shortages know no social distinction and here the string bag come into its own. Into its open moth are popped the Sunday joint, vegetables, fruit, dairy produce, often topped up with a new hat. (Weekly Times, Dec. 9 1942)

Even the most fashion conscious women used a string bag in the 40s and 50s.

String bags had the advantages of being lightweight and able to hold  articles of any shape.   On the downside, it was impossible to put them down without everything falling out. Also, the open netting presented a daily hazard. Unlike  hairnets of the time, which prevented  women factory workers becoming entangled in machinery. everyone had a story of   their string bag  catching on a button….not always their own!  Travelling on crowded trams and buses led to embarrassing  incidents of  men’s trouser buttons becoming entangled. It was panic stations if your stop came up before you could free your groceries.

In the end it was fashion that proved the beginning of the end  for the string bag. As Sydney’s  Smith’ s Weekly reported;

Signs of decay set in some time ago when baskets from China, Italy and the South Sea Islands started popping up in the shops. A further blow was struck when straw became the fashion for handbags…but the rot really set in when that odd material called seagrass came on the market….But the string bag was holding its own pretty well up to Christmas. That gave it the crowning blow.  In some unaccountable manner almost every woman in Sydney seemed to be bitten with the idea that the gift  all her women friends had been sighing for was a seagrass basket. (Smith’s Weekly, Jan 7 1950)

The following photograph appeared in The Age, on December 29 1951.

Here is a doll’s house size string bag and its contents,  dating from the 1950s. It was advertised for sale on a vintage products site.

A STRING BAG FOR A DOLL’S HOUSE

For something that was widely perceived as totally lacking in glamour, it’s amazing that the string shopping bag endured into the 1960s and 70s. Occasionally there had been attempts to come up with alternatives, including using large scarves in the manner of Dick Whittington.   Hmm…a good try, but did the idea catch on? No.

THE STRING BAG AS A HAT!

Source – The Sun, Feb. 1 1947

Farewell.