For a start it's a pretty safe way to operate, since anyone who walks around fumbling with money and purses on the move is more likely to have their belongings stolen. It's possible that men are as at risk from pickpockets or muggers as women, though I'd have thought handbags are simpler to 'pick' than a wallet right next to the body.
Now obviously this all points to the male 'system' of having money in your pockets being better than purses, as it's easier for the owner to access and replace. Why don't women carry loose change, notes or wallets in this way? Well for a start we don't always have pockets, and if we do, often the design is not really large or secure enough for carrying anything of any value. Who can explain why women's clothes don't always have such sensible additions - I'd say it's partly to get a better 'line', to show off our shape, but also obviously a bit of a vicious circle, i.e. women don't need pockets as they carry handbags, why do women have handbags, because they don't have pockets. There is certainly a male bias towards storing allsorts in pockets, as any mother of small boys knows, whereas from an early age little girls are brought up with the idea that handbags are for makeup and all the other paraphenalia that women need to carry. It's also easy to forget that women's trousers were introduced just a matter of decades ago as 'trews' or 'slacks' only ever having side zips, leaving just one side for a possible pocket.
In any case, (suitcase or vanity!), I must admit I hanker after big pockets on a regular basis, and am always glad when I'm wearing them. I haven't quite managed to bring myself to small bags or beads round the neck for glasses when I don't want to wear them, and dread putting them down somewhere and losing them, especially sunglasses in shops, oh too easily done. Then there's keys and a host of other horrible possible scenarios. And talking of keys, ever since watching the Jack Nicholson film 'About Schmidt', where his objectionable character bemoans his wife's habit of getting her house keys out of her bag before she gets out of her car, I have tried to give this habit up (yes I confess I do it too) but like the money in the purse in the bag thing it just feels safer.
Then there's the whole comical stereotype about dancing round your handbags at discos.....
So, while this is all very amusing and sweet, there is a more serious point here. This is where the pursism comes in, and this is a whole bag of worms to open and unravel.
One of my exs used to hate me paying for drinks in a pub. I knew it wasn't the money he objected to, I could tell it was the purse, the sight of a women standing at a bar opening a purse. I did ask him to buy me a new purse for a present, in the hope that if he'd chosen it he would find it less loathsome, and he bought a big bright scarlet one, nothing like a wallet, so it wasn't that he needed it to be less conspicuous, and nothing was ever said, but I knew he hated it. Bearing in mind it's not that many decades since we females wouldn't have even been in there, and in some places we're still not allowed, the purse is somehow an affront to the whole bar culture at least in some men's eyes. So gradually it's become ok for women to go into bars with men, and now even without, but old customs and feelings don't totally disappear for everyone simultaneously.
And yet there is even more to it, the whole thorny thing of when do women pay, and how openly. The whole sensitive thing of who holds the purse strings. And again, it's not that many decades that women have been owning houses, driving cars, having their own keys. (And of course there are cultures where these things don't happen.) But this is probably a much bigger bag than I have time to unpack at the moment, so for the time my lips are pursed.
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