![]() Most of the women were sick - with anemia, sarcomas, rotting jaws, amputated limbs. ![]() In 1934, a small group of courageous dial-painters in Ottawa, Illinois filed suit against their employer, the Radium Dial Company. It was cold-blooded murder in industry, money-making murder." "A list of all the women’s names and a number from one to five next to each name, one being the highest radioactivity level you can have. "I saw it in the archives when I was researching," says Moore. Meanwhile, internal corporate documents predicted how much longer each girl had left. ![]() When more girls sickened, the companies hired medical examiners to test their radioactivity levels, then concealed and lied about the results. Company doctors autopsied dial-painters who died and then lied about the cause of their death. It’s a gruesome story, but it gets worse - because the factory owners denied it was happening. Moore says one of them compared it to "a dentist drilling on a live nerve, hour after hour, for days, weeks, months at a time." Their teeth fell out. "Honeycombed" and "moth-eaten" is how doctors later described the girls’ bones. In the human body, it seeks out and settles in bones- jaw, arm, leg, hip- and progressively destroys them. It was cold-blooded murder in industry, money-making murder. "You know they’re swallowing radioactive substances, and you’re thinking 'no, don’t do it!'" "It’s like watching a horror movie," says Moore. The girls were instructed to keep their brushes sharp by gently sucking them, or "lip pointing." If you know anything about radioactivity, you can guess what happens next. Radium-dial painting factories employed hundreds of girls and young women to do the delicate, finicky painting. "The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women," Kate Moore’s propulsively readable new history, lays out the damning details: in the 1920s and 1930s, radium, the glow-in-the-dark "wonder element" discovered by Marie Curie spawned a new American industry: luminous clock and watch faces. I’m here because I haven’t been able to get their story out of my head. I’ve driven 250 miles to be here, the closest I can get to these women, who died decades before I was born and who were poisoned, horrifically and knowingly, by their employer. It’s a perfect summer day in Ottawa, Illinois and I’m standing in a leafy country cemetery, wondering if the bones of the women buried beneath my feet are radioactive. ![]() Wanting to hear more about how Radiant Dial's treatment of these women affected the town itself, Anne traveled to Ottawa to hear firsthand what happened to the women and their families in the years that followed.Ī version of this essay was also published on Medium. Writer Kate Moore tells their story in “The Radium Girls.” She told Anne Strainchamps she could not stop thinking about the girls. So the young women fought back, in court. The companies refused to do anything about it. ![]() The young women got horribly and gruesomely sick. All day they would press them between their lips to keep them sharp. It was delicate work, and radium-dial factories hired young women to do it. But back in the early 1900s, there was only one way to make a clock glow in the dark-painting the numbers with radium. We take for granted how easily we can read the time in darkness. ![]()
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