"[...] no amount of brushing could get rid of all the dust. The girls were covered in it: their "hands, arms, necks, the dresses, the underclothes, even the corsets of the dial-painters were luminous"."
I don't think I have ever read a more terrifying description of someone's death or imagined one until I got my hands on the book The Radium Girls.
Kate Moore wrote this book with the intent of paying homage to the women who worked as dial-painters for the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in Newark, New Jersey, and the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois. The book explores how a group of young women came to be deceived by their employers on the exposure to radium paint in the workplace.
At the time, radium was all the rage and served multiple purposes, one of them was to paint the dials for soldiers' watches during the war (it is said that one in six Americans soldiers would own a luminous watch), as well as other tools used in aircraft.
"The element was dubbed "liquid sunshine", and it lit not just the hospitals and drawing rooms in America, but its theaters, music halls, grocery stores, and bookshelves."
Discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie late in December 1898, radium was so difficult to extract and, for this reason, valuable around the world. Even though some evidence of its effects were starting to get attention, it was only on academic publications which did not reach common folk affected by it. For instance, "the residue from radium extraction was even dumped into children's sandboxes in schools" and "the firms that profited from radium medicine were the primary producers and publishers of the positive literature".
These obstacles allowed for a long fought legal battle over reparations to the victims of the industry. Some did not dare to speak out of fear, others lost hope while their bodies slowly decayed.
What happened was that the dial-painters used a technique called lip-pointing to paint the dials and it consisted in putting the brush to their mouths. Some even had fun with the paint that made them glow like mystical creatures and stained their buttons, bedrooms and even their teeth.
"Radium was what one might call a boneseeker, just like calcium; and the human body is programmed to deliver calcium stright to the bones [...]".
Most dial-painters were the daughters or granddaughters of immigrants and so did not have the necessary means to stand up to the powerful firms involved. Only with the help of an honorable lawyer and the support of their families and the press, will they manage to put up a decent fight. Even if it will cost them their last efforts.
Nowadays, the radium girls are recognized with statues and films, but it is only the beginning as the world needs to hear their story more often. Because of them, radium was classified as an industrial danger and laws in the U.S. were modified to increase safety standards for workers around the country together with exposing the risks associated with radioactive materials for generations to come. It was with their young sacrifice that they paved the way for justice.
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