Ever since the glowing element had been discovered, it had been known to cause harm Marie Curie herself had suffered radiation burns from handling it. Savoy said that it wasn’t dangerous, that we didn’t need to be afraid."īut that wasn’t true. "Naturally you don’t want to put anything in your mouth that is going to hurt you. "The first thing we asked ‘Does this stuff hurt you?’" Mae Cubberley, who instructed Grace in the technique, later remembered. Every time the girls raised the brushes to their mouths, they swallowed a little of the glowing green paint. The girls were instructed to slip their paintbrushes between their lips to make a fine point - a practice called lip-pointing, or a "lip, dip, paint routine," as playwright Melanie Marnich later described it. Grace and her colleagues obediently followed the technique they’d been taught for the painstaking handiwork of painting the tiny dials, some of which were only 3.5 centimeters wide. They made the most of the perk, wearing their good dresses to the plant so they’d shine in the dance halls at night, and even painting radium onto their teeth for a smile that would knock their suitors dead. Radium’s luminosity was part of its allure, and the dial painters soon became known as the "ghost girls" - because by the time they finished their shifts, they themselves would glow in the dark. Many of them were teenagers, with small hands perfect for the artistic work, and they spread the message of their new job’s appeal through their friend and family networks often, whole sets of siblings worked alongside each other in the studio. Dial painting was "the elite job for the poor working girls" it paid more than three times the average factory job, and those lucky enough to land a position ranked in the top 5% of female workers nationally, giving the women financial freedom in a time of burgeoning female empowerment. With war declared, hundreds of working-class women flocked to the studio where they were employed to paint watches and military dials with the new element radium, which had been discovered by Marie Curie a little less than 20 years before.
She had no idea that her new job would change her life - and workers’ rights - forever. It was four days after the US had joined World War I with two soldier brothers, Grace wanted to do all she could to help the war effort. 'Oops' is never good occupational health policy.On April 10, 1917, an 18-year-old woman named Grace Fryer started work as a dial painter at the United States Radium Corporation (USRC) in Orange, New Jersey. "We really don't want our factory workers to be the guinea pigs for discovery. By the time World War II came around, the federal government had set basic safety limits for handling radiation.Īnd, she says, there are still lessons to be learned about how we protect people who work with new, untested substances. At 107 years old, she was the last of the radium girls.ĭeborah Blum says the radium girls had a profound impact on workplace regulations. You just don't know what to blame," she said. "I was left with different things, but I lived through them. There's no way to know if her time in the factory contributed. Over the years, she had some health problems - bad teeth, migraines, two bouts with cancer. In all, by 1927, more than 50 women had died as a direct result of radium paint poisoning.īut Mae Keane lived. Many of them ended up using the money to pay for their own funerals. Radium Corporation for poisoning and won.
At a factory in New Jersey, the women sued the U.S. Their spines collapsed."ĭozens of women died. "There was one women who the dentist went to pull a tooth and he pulled her entire jaw out when he did it," says Blum. The radium they had swallowed was eating their bones from the inside. By the mid-1920s, dial painters were falling ill by the dozens, afflicted with horrific diseases. "I often wish I had met him after to thank him," Keane said, "because I would have been like the rest of them." "I wouldn't put the brush in my mouth," she remembered many years later.Īfter just a few days at the factory, the boss asked her if she'd like to quit, since she clearly didn't like the work. Her first day, she remembers she didn't like the taste of the radium paint. In 1924, a woman named Mae Keane was hired at a factory in Waterbury Connecticut. "Of course, no one thought it was dangerous in these first couple of years," explains Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook.
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