NAIL-BITING READ
Kate Moore gives us a cautionary tale of corporate evil, writes Michele Magwood
The Radium Girls reminds us why we need health and safety laws
IT usually started with their teeth. Young female factory workers in the US were complaining of toothache, and it being early in the last century, when cosmetic dentistry was unheard of, the problem teeth were simply removed. But their mouths didn’t heal, and more teeth were rotting. The dentist in Newark, New Jersey, was confounded, until the day he tried to remove yet another tooth from a young woman’s mouth, and her entire jawbone came away in his hand.
The patient’s name was Mollie Maggia and she worked at the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation. When she died soon afterwards, the doctors insisted the cause was syphilis.
In this gripping account of appalling corporate malfeasance and awing courage, Kate Moore presents a roll call of the bright young things who went to work in the factories producing luminous dials for clocks and watches and also for military instruments. The job was well-paid and glamorous. The paint they used contained radioactive radium, which made it glow. There was so much of it in the air that the girls’ clothes sparkled with it in the dark; and they used to paint their teeth with it to make them shine at the dances. They were told that it was completely safe, even beneficial, in small doses. As ludicrous as it seems now, radium was marketed as “liquid sunshine”, and infused into everything from face creams to chocolate, butter and lipstick. Radium-laced lingerie promised to perk up sex lives; taken orally it was claimed to act as Viagra.
To paint the dials the girls were instructed to suck the end of the paintbrush into a fine tip — “lip-pointing” — thereby ingesting the radium-laced paint, which settled into their bones.
The girls in New Jersey began to fall ill. Apart from tooth decay they grew grotesque bone sarcomas, their paper-thin skin split open, their leg bones shortened on one side. Their spines disintegrated and they had to wear steel braces. Death certificates stated random illnesses like diphtheria and heart attack as cause of death.
Then in 1925 a pioneering doctor, Harrison Martland, proved the connection between the paint and the illnesses, but the company denied responsibility. It lied to the workers, covering up evidence with its own “expert” advisers. The women didn’t have the money to pay lawyers — they could barely keep up with their medical bills.
Over in Illinois another radium painting studio opened, but the staff were unaware of the danger. There was little sharing of medical information at that time so doctors in the town didn’t make the connection, and after a few years the agonising ailments started up there, too. This time a young lawyer took the case pro bono for a group of dial painters who had been given only months to live, accusing the company of “cold, calculating, money-making murder”. The press went big with it, dubbing the girls “the living dead” and igniting enormous sympathy. There were photos of dramatic bedside hearings, interviews with families, and a ghoulish demonstration of lip-pointing for the court by a victim who had had one of her arms removed.
The case was long and drawn-out but they finally won, after eight appeals, in 1938.
Moore started investigating the radium girls when she directed a play about them called These Shining Lives. She was shocked to find so little information about the women themselves, so she set about researching them, travelling to the US to visit the sites of the story, interviewing the girls’ relatives and raiding newspaper and court archives.
By centering her book on the girls themselves, their backgrounds, personalities, friendships and loves, she pays homage to their short lives. There is some comfort in knowing that because of them, proper safety standards were introduced to protect not only a new generation of dial painters, but also those working with plutonium in making atomic bombs. The girls’ case transformed workers’ rights in the US, leaving a crucial legacy of legislation to ensure safe working conditions. “The radium girls did not die in vain,” Moore writes.
There’s an eerie footnote to the story. Years after she was buried, Mollie Maggia’s remains were exhumed to test the syphilis diagnosis on her death certificate. When her casket was opened, they found her bones were still glowing faintly.