Phony Radium Benefits

During the first and second world wars while men were leaving their homes to fight in foreign places, women recognized their additional responsibility to fill the empty spaces in the workforce. In the midst of the Depression, more women were also motivated to go find jobs and assist in supporting their families financially. But what kind of work did these women do? As employers began to recognize these factors, more jobs in which women were able to excel were created, one of which was dial painting. This involved painting watch dials with a newly created paint containing radium, work that required the small, precise hands and keen eyes of girls in their late teens and early twenties (Graebner, 1998). These jobs were made not only to cater to
Phony radium products claiming to have wondrous health benefits packed the shelves in forms ranging from radium soda to radium toothpaste (Green, 2015). Even radium water became a hot commodity. Fortunately, these products contained such trace amounts of radium that the general population’s exposure to the then unknown lethal effects of radium, was kept to a minimum (Green, 2015). However, the thousands of women working in the growing number of radium watch factories throughout the nation, such as those in New Jersey, Illinois and Connecticut, were not safe from radium’s harmful effects (Graebner, 1998).
It seems as if the Radium Girls were doomed by science from the start of their careers as dial painters. Not only were the girls in the factories working with the radium paint every day, but they were actually encouraged to put the tips of their brushes to their lips to shape them and force them into a finer point, allowing them to more accurately paint the tiny numbers on the watch faces. At the time, the girls saw the opportunity to ingest the radium each day as an extra bonus.
Initially not even the U.S. Radium Corporation who hired the girls knew either. So, when the U.S. Radium Corporation claimed that the true cause of their poor physical state was due to syphilis, they were not really concerned with trying to discover why the girls were dying, but were instead doing everything in their power to prevent any damage to their reputation or liability for the worsening health of their workers (State of New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, n.d., p.3). They blamed syphilis because not only was it an easy way to reduce the respect for the girls, but it is also known as the “great imitator” since there are so many possible symptoms which can seem like they are caused by other diseases (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2016). However, eventually a pattern became clear and the radium in the luminous paint was identified as a culprit. Workers and the general public were outraged and as their cries for justice grew louder, the U.S. Radium Corporation who hired the girls tried even harder to muffle them. When syphilis didn’t work as a defense and scientific evidence showed radium poisoning was most likely causing the health issues of the women, the president of the U.S. Radium Corporation lashed out