Word: petticoats
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...Petticoats & Plots. Cardinal Richelieu, with the aid of his Grey Eminence, Father Joseph, gave France its first effective espionage apparatus. By the early years of the Napoleonic wars, the French secret service under Joseph Fouche was Europe's best. (In 1809 Fouche's men intercepted a British intelligence report written in invisible ink on an agent's petticoat-a device that was considered highly original when it cropped up again during World War I.) Characteristically, however, it was Prussia that introduced Europe to mass espionage. Wilhelm Stieber, spymaster to Bismarck, boasted that he had some...
...said Gimbels, by wearing big collars, rounded jackets, yoked shawls, standaway necklines and stoles. You get the carrot look by wearing slim, clinging skirts. If you will insist on full skirts, for reasons aesthetical or anatomical, you shoo the fullness to the rear and never wear more than one petticoat. It's [also] possible to look utterly 1953 by standing on your head...
...putt, she is apt to fall to her knees and praise Allah; when she misses a short one, she may exclaim, "I feel like nuts & bolts rattling together." On a hot day, she once gathered a circle of women around her on the golf course while she shed her petticoat; another time she startled the gallery with a highland fling. She once insisted on being paid her tournament money in one-dollar bills ("It makes me feel richer"). She operates like a woman whose life is a constant campaign to astound people...
...shot from the 1880s, three bustled and beskirted ladies skip rope, flashing a daring inch of petticoat. In another decade, bicycling was the craze, as Author Jensen illustrates, though the Boston Women's Rescue League warned that 30% of all fallen women had at some time been bicycle riders. After a "long night in armor," a 1910 gym picture shows a bevy of union-suited beauties straining at pushups, pulleys and punching bags. In another 1910 photograph, Julia Ward Howe, at the age of 91, is being wheeled to a suffrage drive to recite her Battle Hymn...
Playhouse on Broadway (Sun. 8:30 p.m., CBS). Melvyn Douglas in Petticoat Fever...