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The Radium Girls were female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting radium dials – watch dials and hands with self-luminous paint. The incidents occurred at three factories in the United States: one in Orange, New Jersey , beginning around 1917; one in Ottawa, Illinois , beginning in the early 1920s; and one in ...
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. Being poisoned by their employer led these women to fight back.
Apr 6, 2023 · Known as the Radium Girls, female watchmakers painted dials with self-luminous paint filled with radioactive radium, leading to severe health complications. While the men wore lead aprons to protect themselves from the radiation, the women were given nothing.
Jun 7, 2024 · Radium Girls, factory workers in radium dial factories, fell ill with anemia, cancer and necrosis of the jaw due to radium poisoning from glow-in-the-dark paint. Radium, initially promoted as a cure-all, was used in consumer products and later in radium paint for instruments during World War I.
The Radium Girls left us all an extraordinary legacy. But who were they? In the book, The Radium Girls, Kate Moore introduces readers to these real women, who lived in New Jersey and in Illinois: separated by 800 miles, but united in their determination to stand up for themselves – and workers everywhere. Here she shares some further details ...
May 10, 2024 · Radium girls. The Doors of Justice are barred to the “Doomed Radium Victims,” and notes explain that it is due to “statute of limitations, summer vacation, postponement,” in this May 20, 1928 New York World editorial cartoon. By Bill Kovarik and Mark Neuzil, from Mass Media and Environmental Conflict (Sage, 1996), p. 32-52.
Mar 16, 2022 · The radium girls, as the newspapers called them, were still in their 20s; many were newlyweds with young children. And all of them were dying. In 1925, five of the women filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Radium Corporation (USRC), based in Orange, New Jersey.
Apr 25, 2017 · Nevertheless, the story of the so-called “radium girls” poisoning soon became a national sensation. Eventually, dial painter Grace Fryer filed a lawsuit along with four other women for damages of $250,000.
May 5, 2017 · During World War I, hundreds of young women went to work in clock factories, painting watch dials with luminous radium paint. But after the girls — who literally glowed in the dark after their...
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