{"id":10878,"date":"2009-07-19T10:49:19","date_gmt":"2009-07-19T15:49:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=10878"},"modified":"2012-10-19T01:37:50","modified_gmt":"2012-10-19T06:37:50","slug":"world-war-ii-era-chest-protector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2009\/07\/19\/world-war-ii-era-chest-protector\/","title":{"rendered":"World War II Era Chest Protector"},"content":{"rendered":"

Penny R. sent in this picture from c1943<\/a>.\u00a0 In it, two women model newly designed safety gear for working women.\u00a0 The woman on the right is wearing a plastic bra designed to protect her breasts from “occupational accidents.”\u00a0 Don’t worry fellas, the “girls” will be safe!<\/p>\n

\"3660776880_42ea267323\"<\/p>\n

From commenter, Sanguinity, who seems to know what s\/he is talking about:<\/p>\n

I couldn’t say, not without knowing what the job in question was, what the job’s hazards, why the employer went for protective equipment instead of changing the job, nor when (or if!) breast protectors were required (as opposed to being requested by the employees).<\/p>\n

(And frankly, those answers would only help me judge whether were useful from today’s<\/em> perspective. The methods of occupational safety have changed hugely since the 1940s; quite a lot of what was common safety practice in the ’40s would be unacceptable today. Even if breast protectors for a given job wouldn’t pass muster today, they might very well have been useful then<\/em>, within the context of acceptable safety practices of the day.)<\/p>\n

No, what’s unusual about this photo to me, as a safety professional, is that they were willing to consider issuing sex-specific safety equipment at all. Nowadays, creating and maintaining sex-specific safety regs looks very much like sexual discrimination, and can easily cross the line into outright discrimination if you’re not thinking about it very carefully. (Not to mention: who’s going to check under these women’s coveralls to make sure they’re wearing their required protective equipment, assuming breast protectors are required?) Nah, even if initial analysis indicated that breast protectors would be reasonable\/useful for a given job, any contemporary safety pro worth his or her salt is gonna work pretty hard to find another way to do things.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Lisa Wade is a\u00a0professor of sociology at Occidental College<\/a>. You can follow her on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Facebook<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Penny R. sent in this picture from c1943.\u00a0 In it, two women model newly designed safety gear for working women.\u00a0 The woman on the right is wearing a plastic bra designed to protect her breasts from “occupational accidents.”\u00a0 Don’t worry fellas, the “girls” will be safe! From commenter, Sanguinity, who seems to know what s\/he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,225,55,2103,2102,2100,253,309,76],"class_list":["post-10878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bodies","tag-clothesfashion","tag-gender","tag-gender-bodies","tag-gender-history","tag-gender-work","tag-history","tag-warmilitary","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10878"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10883,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10878\/revisions\/10883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}