WASHINGTON Correspondent Bonnie Angela has covered politicians and other public people on six continents for 16 years, but the last place she expected to be the other day was in a Bayonne, N.J., brassiere factory. When Eleanor McGovern chose that unlikely spot to hustle votes for Husband George, Angelo and other reporters were on hand. Politics has obviously changed since the genteel kaffeeklatsch campaigning that most political wives used to practice, and the jet-paced public styles of Pat Nixon and Eleanor McGovern are at the heart of this week's cover story.

Angelo, who did the principal reporting on both women, has also written about the activities of most of Washington's prominent politicians, including the men behind Pat and Eleanor. She began following Mrs. McGovern down the political trail during the Democratic primaries last spring. Last week, amidst a hectic schedule of campaign visits to youth groups, senior citizens, day-care centers and factories, the two sat down again for a private chat in the McGovern hotel suite in White Plains, N.Y.

Pat Nixon has been a favorite subject of Angelo stories since the 1968 campaign.

Angelo has accompanied the often inaccessible First Lady on a variety of jaunts, from Idaho Falls, Idaho, to Africa's Ivory Coast.

Last week Angelo was back in the press section of the presidential jet for a stretch of hard campaigning that within two days encountered gale winds in Montana, a sleet storm in Wyoming, and heat of 102DEG F. in Southern California. "First Ladies," says Angelo, "are no longer treated as perishable commodities."

If following one campaign is demanding, keeping track of two can border on masochism. Missed meals, misplaced luggage and late nights become part of a political reporter's life-style in an election year. Solitary confinement, however, was not part of

the course until one day recently when Angelo, accompanying Mrs. Nixon's party, found herself locked in a hotel room in Yellowstone Park. With no phone, no response to her shouts and the press bus about to leave, she threw caution -- and herself -- to the winds: "Feeling like the prisoner of Zenda, I opened the window, forced the screen and jumped out. The room, happily, was on the first floor."

Angelo's reporting from the road went to Associate Editor Jonathan Larsen, who wrote the story. For Larsen, who recently served as our Saigon bureau chief, writing about the feminine side of presidential politics offered an interesting contrast. "In Viet Nam," he says, "the wives of some politicians are their husbands' silent business partners, and often you hear about them only when a scandal breaks. Here they have become vocal members of the team and must go on display for public approval. The American wives have it tougher."

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