Well into the 1920s, the dangers of radium were not known to the public, although some executives and scientists in the industry were increasingly aware and protected themselves in the factories where the women worked. “Radium to Extend Life to 100 Years,” The New York Herald, October 14, 1921, p. When Marie and Paul Curie discovered radium in 1898, it was soon viewed as a wondrous and powerful element: a cure for cancer, and a source of beauty and vitality. A different company, Radium Dial, opened a facility in Ottawa, Illinois in late 1922 and Donohue was hired. Radium watches and clocks continued to be popular after World War I. “Radium Dial Studio” employment ad, Free Trader-Journal and Ottawa Fair Dealer (Ottawa, IL), October 25, 1922, 4 O’Clock Edition, p. ad, The New York Times, November 4, 1917, Rotogravure Picture Section, part 6, p. “Xmas Gifts for Men Over There, and Those Who Are Going!” Franklin Simon & Co. They painted watch dials for soldiers and instrument panels for military equipment-all glowing in the dark. With America entering the First World War on April 6, 1917, some viewed their work as a patriotic contribution to the war effort. By 1917, women were dial-painting at the United States Radium Corporation plant in Orange, New Jersey. For its time, the work was well-paid skilled labor for women. The women were hopeful when they began working in the radium dial factories. “‘Living Death’ Victims,” The Times-News (Hendersonville, NC), February 14, 1938, p.1.ĭonohue, along with others, fought back: they brought lawsuits against the companies that employed them and they won, even though some did not live to receive their compensation. Dubbed “Radium Girls” and “Living Dead,” they suffered radium poisoning and painful, early deaths. She was among the women who painted luminous numbers on watch, clock, and instrument dials using radium-laced paint in factories in New Jersey, Illinois, and Connecticut. The story of real women at the mercy of businesses who see them only as a potential risk to the bottom line is haunting precisely because of how little has changed the glowing ghosts of the radium girls haunt us still.Catherine Wolfe Donohue is not a well-known name, but in the late 1930s newspapers featured her as she lay dying. But Radium Girls is frighteningly easily to set in a wider context. (A New Jersey dentist who treated several afflicted women went to USRC looking for a payout for his silence, since it was “customary for experts to testify for the people who pa them.”)Īt moments, Moore’s narrative style and passion for the radium girls’ story can tip over into an odd hard sell she writes of one of the women, “She is still remembered now - you are still remembering her now,” as if afraid we won’t put this story in a wider context otherwise. But though Moore’s carefully sketches the lives and friendships of the women affected, the companies emerge as the most vivid characters - villains that would seem cartoonishly evil, except for how familiar it all sounds. The outrages don’t stop there, of course this book’s awash in crooked doctors, shameless lawyers, and company men. (Radiant Dial tested its girls and never gave them their results, even as internal correspondence was sorting them by radiation levels to see who’d be first to die.) There’s a reason Moore repeatedly notes the girls’ phosphorescence as ghostly the companies knew they were doomed. The worst descriptions of disease (and I’ll be surprised if you don’t run your tongue across your teeth at least once) can’t match the fatal callousness of the companies that knew the dangers of radium long before they ever admitted them. The history of business is a history of violence. Radium killed these young women, but Moore leaves no room for misunderstanding: The companies murdered them. And the horror at the heart of Kate Moore’s Radium Girls lies in the way doctors, the company, and the law failed these women as they sought justice for the lives they were losing. Maggia was the first of the girls at USRC to die in agony from radium poisoning, but far from the last. She painted glowing numbers on dials with their radium paint, licking her paintbrush for accuracy as she’d been taught, and it killed her. Later strikers invoked the match girls as inspiration girls who’d come together so something so dangerous couldn’t happen again.īut no one told Mollie Maggia about the match girls before she went to the United States Radium Corporation in New Jersey, just after World War I. Against expectations, they won - a watershed for Victorian industrial workers. A girl with “phossy jaw” would literally glow in the dark as her jawbone slowly disintegrated. Their reason was a particularly horrifying working condition: ingesting phosphorus. In 1888, the match girls of London went on strike.
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