My Skirts and Petticoats Have Saved Me

The 19th-century Victorian dress above would be really convenient at parties. I would totally be an island in that hoop skirt talking a bon bon from that elongated-server-wielding nice man.

How kind of him to think of me in my condition, the condition of being dressed like a lady.

Ada Lovelace, collaborated with Charles Babbage, the so-called 'Father of Computers,"
and wrote the world's first computer coding algorithm.

@magdods on Twitter reminded me that 19th-century woman scientist Mary Kingsley claimed "her skirts and petticoats saved her when she fell into a tiger trip full of pointed sticks."

I love that so much. Because tiger trips full of pointed sticks -- at least figuratively -- are a problem faced by so. many.

Mary Kingsley

For instance -- tiger trip alert -- to make myself look less like Pale Death-in-January, I was putting on blush in a color called So You Went to Smith? [bonus read: The History of Blush] and my daughter, 10, asked why I was putting PINK ROCK DUST on my face and I had no answer. Perhaps I should have said, "they used to use crushed beets and mulberries."

Perhaps Mary Kingsley's real tiger trips were far easier than these tricky ones today.