The Radium Girls summary

Radium brought an unexpected windfall of income to some morally questionable businesses, which in turn led to some new and unexpectedly deadly jobs. One of the more popular jobs was with the United States Radium Corporation (USRC) in New Jersey. From around 1915 the company began hiring women to hand-paint watch dials using poisonous, radium-based paint. These positions were highly sought-after among working-class women. They were paid far more than what was typical; while the fact that it wasn’t your typical factory work gave the job a somewhat glamorous air.

The USRC hired a range of female workers – some only 15 years-old – with others in their early to mid-twenties. They paid these workers not by the hour, but by the watch. The faster they worked and the more paint they exposed themselves to, the more they earned. As a result, some made as much as $2,080 a year – around $40,000 these days. This was considered a very high salary, and put the watch ladies in the top five percent of female wage earners.

It could be considered ironic that your life would be ruined from exposure to a supposedly life-saving substance, but this is exactly what happened to the women at the watch painting studios. Similar to calcium, when radium enters the body it heads straight for the bones. It starts to eat away at them – eventually creating holes and causing them to crumble at the slightest touch.

The first signs began to appear around three years after the painting began. Some of the girls complained of loose teeth that needed to be removed, but then once the teeth were gone their gums wouldn’t heal. Workers also complained of jaw pains – with more than one girl having their jaw disintegrate – and abscesses in the bone oozing pus into their mouths. On at least two occasions, a girl reached into her mouth and actually plucked out a piece of her jaw.

Despite ruining the lives of their employees, both the USRC in New Jersey and the Radium Dial Corporation (RDC) in Illinois continued to act in deplorable ways, all in an effort to escape culpability. Adding to their troubles, the girls in both New Jersey and Illinois had a hard time finding lawyers who were willing to take on these companies.

Both the USRC and the RDC were staffed with professional legal teams. The USRC even had a “doctor” willing to testify that what the girls were suffering from was not radium poisoning. This so-called expert witness was actually a man with a PhD in physiology and not a medical doctor at all.

For those who remained determined to see their case through to the end, there were some silver linings. The first trial was held in New Jersey in 1928, with five radium girls represented by the lawyer Raymond Berry. During the trial, Berry convinced the families to agree on a settlement, since he wasn’t sure that the companies wouldn’t drag out the case for so long the girls would never see a penny. This settlement, however, was much better than the paltry sum others had already received.

The five girls were given a lump sum intended to cover past and future medical bills, their court fees, and a pension. Unsurprisingly, the USRC managed to add extremely unhelpful conditions designed to make future payments as difficult as possible to receive.

When the incidents of this story first unfolded in the 1920s and 30s, women struggled for a modicum of the respect ascribed to men. But the tragedy of the radium girls brought about some of the most profound changes in society.

First, there were the effects the case had in both science and law.