At the onset of World War I, several factories were established across the United States to produce watches and military dials painted with a material containing radium, a radioactive element that glows in the dark. Hundreds of young women were hired for the well-paying painting jobs because their small hands were well suited for the exacting, detailed work.
Radium had been discovered just 20 years earlier by French physicists Marie Curie and Pierre Curie, and its properties were not well known. Because it had been used successfully in the treatment of cancer, many considered radium a miracle element, and a variety of commercial products were manufactured in which radium was an ingredient, including toothpaste and cosmetics.
The women hired to paint dials came to be known as “ghost girls” because the radium dust to which they were exposed daily made their clothes, hair, and skin literally glow. Many of the women wore their best dresses on the job so the fabric would shine brilliantly when they went dancing after work. Some even applied the paint to their teeth because it gave them radiant smiles.
What’s more, the painters ingested the radioactive substance as part of their job. Because some of the watch dials on which they worked were extremely small, they were instructed to use their lips to bring their paint brushes to a fine point. When they asked about radium’s safety, they were assured by their managers that they had nothing to worry about.
Of course, that wasn’t true. Radium can be extremely dangerous, especially with repeated exposure. Marie Curie suffered radiation burns while handling it, and she eventually died from radiation exposure. Other researchers also perished.
It wasn’t long before the “Radium Girls” began to experience the physical ravages of their exposure. Among the first was Amelia (“Mollie”) Maggia, who painted watches for the Radium Luminous Materials Corp. (later the United States Radium Corp.) in Orange, New Jersey. Maggia’s first symptom was a toothache, which required the removal of the tooth. Soon the tooth next to it also had to be extracted. Painful ulcers, bleeding and full of pus, developed where the teeth had been.
The mysterious malady spread throughout Maggia’s mouth and lower jaw, which had to be removed, then into other parts of her body. Maggia died on September 12, 1922, of a massive hemorrhage. Doctors were puzzled as to the cause of her condition, and, oddly, they determined that she had died of syphilis.
In growing numbers, other Radium Girls became deathly ill, experiencing many of the same agonizing symptoms as Maggia. For two years their employer vociferously denied any connection between the girls’ deaths and their work. Facing a downturn in business because of the growing controversy, the company finally commissioned an independent study of the matter, which concluded that the painters had died from the effects of radium exposure. Refusing to accept the report’s findings, the company commissioned additional studies that came to the opposite conclusion, and it decried the girls who had taken ill. The public continued to assume that radium was safe.
In 1925 a pathologist named Harrison Martland developed a test that proved conclusively that radium had poisoned the watch painters by destroying their bodies from the inside. The radium industry tried to discredit Martland’s findings, but the Radium Girls themselves fought back. Many knew that their days were numbered, but they wanted to do something to help their colleagues still working with the deadly substance.
In 1927 attorney Raymond Berry agreed to accept their case. Many of the watch painters had just months to live and were forced to accept an out-of-court settlement. Still, their experiences made the issue of radium safety a front-page story across the world. But, even then, the United States Radium Corp. denied its role, and women continued to get sick and die. It wasn’t until 1938, when a dying radium worker named Catherine Wolfe Donohue successfully sued the Radium Dial Co. over her illness, that the issue was finally settled.
The legacy of the Radium Girls can’t be understated. Their case was among the first in which a company was held responsible for the health and safety of its employees, and it led to a variety of reforms as well as to the creation of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.