The Radium Girls and One Who Survived

An ad of the time showed a wrist watch glowing in the dark. Beneath the picture were the words "Made possible by the magic of radium." Another showed a lovely woman, with the add offering various bottles of radium as cosmetics to enhance beauty.

The years: 1917 to 1926. The victims: women, many young. The companies: US Radium Corporation, Waterbury Clock, and others.  The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, was unheard of.

U.S. Radium hired about 70 working-class women for tasks including the handling of radium. They were to paint watch dials, considered ideally suited for small female hands. Most women thought it easy work, and the pay was good: a few cents for each dial completed.Company owners and their scientists, familiar with the effects of radium, carefully avoided exposing themselves to it. Chemists used lead screens, masks and tongs.

The radium girls mixed the radium paint and applied camel hair brushes to watch dials, which would glow in the dark. With 12 numbers to paint each employee painted over 200 dials a day for one and a half cents per dial. (About 29 cents today.) Because the brushes lost shape after a few strokes supervisors advised the women to swirl the brushes into a point with their lip.  They had a kind of mantra for this: lip, dip, paint. If not the lips, they were to use their tongues.

Unlike the higher-ups, they were told nothing about the danger of radium and used it to paint nails, teeth, and faces for fun, as they would then glow in the dark.

Many began to suffer from anemia, bone fractures, and radium jaw. One woman went to the dentist to have a tooth pulled and he pulled her entire jaw out with the tooth.  Legs broke underneath women. Their spines collapsed. The radium was eating their bones at the marrow.

US Radium (and other watch-dial companies) rejected their claims. Instead they submitted the women to medical examinations to attribute the problem to syphilis, among other phony causes.

The women joined together to sue the company. But the law moved slowly. As an example, Grace Fryer couldn't find a lawyer willing to take on US Radium and finally, two years later, one agreed to handle the case. By 1928 and the first court appearance, two women were bedridden and could not raise their hands to take an oath.  They won the case, but the proceeds would cover their funeral expenses. Before the court appearance, over 50 women had died by 1927.

One woman survived to age 107. Hired in 1924 by The Waterbury Clock Company in Connecticut her name was Mae Keane and she died in 2014.  At 18 years old her luck was twofold. First, she didn't like putting the brush in her mouth. Second, having observed her, the factory supervisor asked if she'd like to quit. She did.  Years later she said, "I often wish I had met him after to thank him because I would have been like the rest of them."

Still she has doubts and suspicions about her time at Waterbury Clock. Twenty years later she lost all her teeth. She also had migraines and two bouts with cancer, colon and breast.

Decades later, scientists dug up bones of the Radium Girls and found they were radioactive.

When interviewed in 2004 by The Hartford Courant Mae Keane said, “We were young. We didn’t know anything about the paint.”