The Forgotten Story Of The Radium Girls
On April 10, 1917, an 18-year-old woman named Grace Fryer started work as a dial painter at the United States Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey. It was four days after the US had joined World War I; with two soldier brothers, Grace wanted to do all she could to help the war effort. She had no idea that her new job would change her life — and workers’ rights — forever.
But that wasn’t true. Ever since the glowing element had been discovered, it had been known to cause harm; Marie Curie herself had suffered radiation burns from handling it. People had died of radium poisoning before the first dial painter ever picked up her brush. That was why the men at the radium companies wore lead aprons in their laboratories and handled the radium with ivory-tipped tongs. Yet the dial painters were not afforded such protection, or even warned it might be necessary.
Mollie was literally falling apart. And she wasn’t the only one; by now, Grace Fryer, too, was having trouble with her jaw and suffering pains in her feet, and so were the other radium girls.On September 12, 1922, the strange infection that had plagued Mollie Maggia for less than a year spread to the tissues of her throat. The disease slowly ate its way through her jugular vein. At 5 p.m. that day, her mouth was flooded with blood as she hemorrhaged so fast that her nurse could not staunch it.
Martland also explained what was happening inside their bodies. As early as 1901, it had been evident that radium could harm humans dramatically when applied externally; Pierre Curie once remarked that he would not want to be in room with a kilo of pure radium because he believed it would burn all the skin off his body, destroy his eyesight, and"probably kill [him].
For Martland had also realized that the poisoning was fatal. And now that it was inside of them, there was no way of removing the radium from the girls’ beleaguered bones.Front and side views of a dial painter with a radium-induced sarcoma of the chin.Despite the radium industry’s attempts to discredit Martland’s pioneering work, it hadn’t reckoned with the courage and tenacity of the radium girls themselves. They started banding together to fight against the injustice.
Yet the Illinois firm, Radium Dial, took a leaf out of USRC’s book and denied responsibility. Although the firm’s medical tests proved that the Illinois women were showing clear symptoms of radium poisoning, it lied about the results. It even placed a full-page ad in the local paper:"If we at any time had reason to believe that any conditions of the work endangered the health of our employees, we would at once have suspended operations.
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