The story of the abuse perpetrated against the predominantly female workforce in the 1920s in New Jersey, some 20 miles west of New York City, stands out from most such cases by the fact that the resulting litigation was covered widely in the media. Syphilis was often cited in attempts to smear the women’s reputations. What’s more, the painters ingested the radioactive substance because they were instructed to use their lips to bring their paint brushes to a fine point, as this saved time and money.Īs part of a campaign by the companies, workers’ deaths were attributed by unethical and corrupt medical professionals to other causes. Some even applied the paint to their teeth because it gave them radiant smiles.” Many of the women wore their best dresses on the job so the fabric would shine brilliantly when they went dancing after work. “The women hired to paint dials came to be known as ‘ghost girls,’” according to the Britannica website, “because the radium dust to which they were exposed daily made their clothes, hair, and skin literally glow. The women workers were considered expendable. However, the companies were aware of the dangers, and protected executives and scientists. Radium had only been discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie and its properties were not fully understood. Many of the women contracted multiple illnesses, including bone fractures and necrosis of the jaw, a condition dubbed “radium jaw.” It is unknown how many workers died. Scripted by Mohler and Brittany Shaw, the film recounts an important episode revealing once more the harsh reality of American capitalism.Īround the time of American entry into World War I in 1917, female workers began to be hired by corporations in the US (and Canada) to hand-paint watch faces with radium-based, self-luminous paint. Streaming on Netflix, Radium Girls, originally released in 2018, is a historical docudrama directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler. And yet, as narrative text at the end of the movie reminds us, radium paint continued to be used well into the 1960s, putting countless lives at risk.Directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler screenplay by Mohler and Brittany Shaw The case forced a reckoning within American industry, as workers realized they could sue their employers for unsafe working conditions, forcing the latter to better regulate potential dangers. Still, the women prevailed, and a jury awarded damages of $10,000 to each (roughly worth $150,000 in 2020), along with a $600 (about $9,000 now) a year payment for medical expenses. Indeed, by 1928, when the suit finally went to court, two were confined to their beds. The reason? They knew many of the women wouldn’t live out the decade. For several years, the “radium girls,” as they were dubbed in the press, battled a company determined to let the proceedings drag on for as long as possible. In the 1920s, a group of five women led by plant worker Grace Fryer decided to sue American Radium. There were three main factories in the United States dedicated to this work, but the most famous is the one in Orange, NJ, where Radium Girls is set. Radium dial painting started gaining traction around 1917 in the United States, to provide watches that soldiers heading off to the trenches of Europe could read in the dark. Though Bessie and Jo are based on composites of real people, the story itself is rooted in truth.
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