In the 1920s, a job painting watch dials looked like a lucky break. The women who did it were told the substance was safe, and many of them were even encouraged to put the brush to their lips to give it a fine point. The substance was radium. The women who did the work would come to be known as the Radium Girls.
The most famous factory was the U.S. Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, operating from about 1917 onward. It made luminous watches and instruments using a radium-based paint sold under the name "Undark." To keep the lines sharp, workers were taught the technique that would destroy them: point the brush with your lips between strokes. Some swallowed tiny amounts of paint every day. For a while, radium was a novelty, even a beauty trend; workers were said to glow faintly, to dress up for dances with the dust still in their hair.
The damage was slow and it was cruelly specific. Radium behaves, chemically, like calcium, so the body deposits it into the bones. There it sits, firing radiation at close range, for years. The first signs were aching teeth and loosening jaws. Then came a condition doctors named "radium jaw": the jawbone rotting from the inside, teeth falling out, ulcers that would not heal. The women were, in effect, being destroyed from within by their own skeletons.
The company denied everything. One of the workers, Grace Fryer, led a group of women who sued, and the press nicknamed them the "Five Doomed Women." The first court proceedings began in January 1928, but the women were already dying, and they were under pressure to settle before they could testify fully. The New Jersey case was settled in 1928, with each woman receiving roughly ten thousand dollars plus six hundred dollars a year. Meanwhile, at the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois, a second, quieter tragedy played out through the 1920s and 1930s with the same signature of denial.
The Illinois case proved decisive in a different way. A worker named Catherine Donohue, by now bedridden, was the central figure in a ruling in the spring of 1938 that went in the women's favor, with an award of about five thousand six hundred and sixty-one dollars. The company appealed, and on 23 October 1939, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal. By then, Catherine Donohue was already dead, at thirty-five.
What the Radium Girls won, they mostly did not live to enjoy. But the case changed the shape of the law. It established, in practice, that an employer can be held responsible for the slow harm done to workers by the conditions of their job, and that the clock on a claim should not simply run out before the harm even appears. Modern occupational-disease law is built in part on what these women endured.
The lip-pointing technique deserves to be understood clearly, because it explains everything that followed. A radium paint brush is a fine-tipped instrument, and fine tips lose their point. Workers were trained to draw the brush between their lips to restore a sharp end, which meant a small amount of radium entered the mouth with every dip. No one thought much of it, because radium was not treated as the danger it was. It had, after all, been sold as a health tonic, added to medicines and even to drinking water, on the theory that its energy was invigorating.
By the time the women began to sicken, science had learned better, but the companies had learned to defend themselves better too. They stonewalled, they questioned the women's health, and they delayed. Grace Fryer and her fellow plaintiffs were, by the time their case reached court, visibly dying, and the settlements they accepted were shaped by the knowledge that they might not live to see a verdict.
The Illinois case broke the pattern. There, the women persisted long enough to force a court to rule on the merits, and the finding that radium had caused their injuries was a direct rebuff to years of denial. When the Supreme Court declined to hear the company's appeal in October 1939, the ruling stood. The Radium Girls had established that a worker's body is not the employer's to spend.
They are remembered, fittingly, by a strange detail: the graves of some of the women were found to still be faintly radioactive decades later. Even the earth around them carried the evidence they had been denied in the courtroom. They had been told they were safe, and they had insisted, against the denials, that they were right.
https://3026alive.com