During World War II, when American women were entering the workforce, a California company decided that "safety" on the job meant wearing goggles . . . and hard, plastic bras. Here a model shows off the engineer's safety bra.


And below, here are more uniforms for women in the workplace. They look like they're ready to fight aliens (or maybe they are aliens) in a Doctor Who story. You can see more women fortified to work with machines, and actually working with those machines, in the Records of the Women's Bureau of the US National Archives on Flickr.