Keeping their pants on.

• Position: France - French women on no-pants rule - Brief article

The fashionable women of Paris have been sporting trousers for decades. But it turns out they were breaking a law rooted in the French Revolution (1789-99). In January, France overturned a 1799 police decree prohibiting women in Paris from "dressing like a man" without permission. During the Revolution, long pants worn by working class men became a symbol of protest against the aristocracy, who donned short, puffy knickers called culottes. (The rebels called themselves the sans-culottes, literally "without knickers.") French women wanted to join the rebels...