Radium Girls Tania Saade
Who Were They?
- Small–town girls from New Jersey hired by local factories to paint the clock faces of luminous watches
- Luminous watches: new army gadget used by American soldiers
- The women were told that the glow-in-the-dark radioactive paint was harmless
- They painted 250 dials a day, licking their brushes every few strokes with their lips and tongue to give them a fine point
Working Conditions
- Between 1917 and 1926, the U.S. Radium Corporation hired around 70 women from Essex County, NJ
- The women were paid the modern equivalent of $0.27 per watch dial
- The harder they worked, unknowingly swallowing deadly amounts of poison each time to make a few extra pennies, the faster death would approach
- Some girls even painted their nails, teeth and faces with the luminous paint, marketed as “UnDark"
- At the dawn of the 1920s, an estimated total of 4,000 workers were hired by corporations in the U.S. and Canada alone to paint watch faces after the initial success in developing a glow-in-the-dark radioactive paint
America's Favourite Miracle Ingredient
- The dangers of radiation were not well understood by the general public
- Radium-based household commercial products had become the norm
- Cold remedies, toothpaste, wool for babies, children’s toys, and even drinking water
- Even products that didn’t actually contain radium tried to market their products to imply they were somehow radio-active
OMG!!!!
- The most baffling part about this story is not the fact that the general public had no idea that radium was so dangerous, but the fact that some people most certainly knew and said nothing!
- While young female factory workers fresh out of high school were encouraged to swallow radium on a daily basis, the owners and chemists were using lead screens, masks and tongs to handle the radium
Deaths
- By 1927, more than 50 women died as a direct result of radium paint poisoning
- Radium paint poisoning was eating the bones from the inside
- The inventor of the paint, Dr. von Sochocky, died himself in 1928 from exposure to the radioactive material
- It’s still unknown how many died from exposure to radiation but it’s clear how many could have been saved
Symptoms
- Jaws began to swell and deteriorate, teeth began falling out for no reason
- Horrific report: one woman went to the dentist to have a tooth pulled and ended up with an entire piece of her jaw being accidentally removed
- A local dentist began to investigate the mysterious phenomenon of deteriorating jawbones among women in his town and discovered the link that they had all worked for the US Radium plant, licking radio-active paintbrushes at one time or another
False Medical Claims
- The Factories hired doctors and dentists on their payroll and rejected claims that their workers were sick from radium exposure
- They tried to pin the girls’ deaths on syphilis to smear the reputations of the young unmarried women who had come to work for them
- Inexplicably, the medical community went along with all of it, fully cooperating with the powerful companies
Grace Fryer & The Court Case
- Grace Fryer found a lawyer who would go up against U.S. Radium
- Four other factory girls joined the suit and the media took an interest in the case
- They were nicknamed “The Radium Girls”
- At their first court appearance, their health had so rapidly deteriorated that none could even raise their arms to take the oath
- By the second hearing, all were too ill to attend
- The case was adjourned for several months because several US Radium witnesses were summering in Europe
End of Court Case
- Not expecting to live much longer, the women eventually settled out of court each receiving the equivalent of about $100,000 today
- All of their medical and legal expenses paid
- They would also receive a $600 per year annuity for as long as they lived
- The last of the girls only lived two years after the settlement was agreed
Industry Safety Standards
- The girls were able to make a significant historical impact on industrial safety standards
- The right of individual workers to sue for damages from corporations due to labor abuse was established as a direct result of the Radium Girls' case
- US Radium continued making luminous watches and other materials using radium paint for the army but after the new worker safety laws were introduced, not a single factory worker ever suffered from radium sickness at their plant again
The Radium Girls were so contaminated that if you stood over their graves today with a Geiger counter, the radiation levels would still cause the needles to jump more than 80 years later.
Works Cited
- www.messynessychic.com/2015/07/02/the-radium-girls-and-the-generation-that-brushed-its-teeth-with-radioactive-toothepaste/
- www.waterburyobserver.org/node/586