“Our instructors told us to point them with our lips,” she said. After a few strokes, the brushes would lose their shape, and the women couldn’t paint accurately. They mixed up glue, water and radium powder into a glowing greenish-white paint, and carefully applied it with a camel hair brush to the dial numbers. Racks of dials waiting to be painted sat next to each woman’s chair. Grace started working in the spring of 1917 with 70 other women in a large, dusty room filled with long tables. They all had a good laugh, then got back to work, painting a glow-in-the-dark radium compound on the dials of watches, clocks, altimeters and other instruments. The women even painted their nails and their teeth to surprise their boyfriends when the lights went out. But everyone knew the stuff was harmless. It was a little strange, Fryer said, that when she blew her nose, her handkerchief glowed in the dark.
Grace Fryer and the other women at the radium factory in Orange, New Jersey, had no idea that they were being poisoned. The lasting legacy of the women's fight led to the introduction of new safety standards to protect a whole new generation of dial painters, as well as those working with plutonium in making atomic bombs.The Doors of Justice are barred to the “Doomed Radium Victims,” and notes explain that it is due to “statute of limitations, summer vacation, postponement,” in this New York World editorial cartoon.īy Bill Kovarik and Mark Neuzil, from Mass Media and Environmental Conflict (Sage, 1996), p. It took eight appeals before the former radium girls finally had a victory, in October 1939. An autopsy soon proved that "each and every portion of tissue and bone tested gave evidence of radioactivity". During the case, the body of Molly Maggia was exhumed and taken away for an autopsy.Īccording to Moore, Maggia's body was in "a good state of preservation" five years after her death.
THE REAL RADIUM GIRLS PRO
In 1927, five former dial painters, led by Catherine Donohue and represented by lawyer Leonard Grossman, (working pro bono), filed a legal case against the US Radium Corporation. vmzIvyoOPC- Pulp Librarian JanuA VICTORY AT LAST
THE REAL RADIUM GIRLS TRIAL
After a long trial and painful testimony they won their case.
It took the death of a male employee of the radium firm for experts to finally take the issue seriously.įinally in 1938 five women - dubbed the Radium Girls - sued the Radiant Dial Company they worked for after Radium exposure left them close to death. But 800 miles away in Ottawa, Illinois, where a new studio had opened, the painters were unaware of the problems - and their employers did not inform them of the now-established danger." Moore writes: "In New Jersey, the women's illnesses had an understandable effect on the profession's popularity: dial painting declined. The only study into the safety of radium was conducted in the same factory.Īccording to Moore, instead of radium firms suspending dial-painting, the managers refused to accept any responsibility and vowed to find the "real cause" of the women's illness. Radium was not suspected at first because the official line was that it was safe in small doses. sbR334rpAE- Pulp Librarian JanuON THE BRINK OF DEATH In the 1920s it was marketed as a 'scientific' panacea of wellness. Radium and radioactivity was soon a main ingredient in quack medicine: with extravagent claims made for its health-restoring and energetic properties.
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