The “Radium Girls” were female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning at three different sites in the United States.
The job seemed perfect: the pay was almost triple the average working women’s salary and the work seemed light. Their main job was to brush glowing paint onto clocks and other instruments for the United States Radium Company, which was a major supplier of radio-luminescent watches to the military. Their plant in New Jersey employed over 100 women to paint the radium-lit watches.
While engineers (who handled large bundles of the raw material) wore lead aprons to pretect themselves against the radiation, the women were told that the paint was safe as they were only exposed to very small doses. To make matters worse, they were even told to lick their brushes for detail work. No precautions were taken and many of the women unknowingly digested small doses of the highly radioactive substance.
Some of the women even jokingly painted their nails, face, and teeth with the radioactive paint. They literally glowed in the dark after their shifts.
The radium paint was only invented in 1917.The bright element has a dark side. Inside the human body, radium starts wreaking havoc on the body’s tissues. Cells are mutated and killed.
Many of the radium girls later began to suffer from anemia, bone fractures and necrosis of the jaw, which became known as as “radium jaw” (see picture above). One radium girl, Mollie Maggia, started experiencing first symptoms in 1922. She had a toothache and went to the dentist, who pulled it out. More teeth had to come out over the next weeks and the wounds did not show any signs of healing. The dentist eventually told her that she needed surgery to remove a large abscess under her jaw. During the surgery, he found that Mollie’s jaw bones were crumbling. Mollie died the same year.
Meanwhile, other factory workers were showing similar symptoms. Others were diagnosed with various kinds of cancer. Dozens were sick or dead by 1924.
On 18 May 18 1927, a law suit was filed against the US Radium Corporation by a young New Jersey attorney who represented several radium girls. Each of them asked for $250,000 in compensation. Each girl received $10,000 and an additional $600 per year until death. US Radium would also pay all medical and legal expenses and all future medical expenses.
The legal battle received wide-spread media attention and paved the way for more class action lawsuits that, in return, would lead to greater workplace safety and accountability.
