The Girls Who Glowed to Death

“It is not for myself I care. I am thinking more of the hundreds of girls to whom this may serve as an example.” - Grace Fryer

In my previous article about Eben Byers, I wrote about a millionaire who drank approximately 1,400 bottles of radioactive water and slowly lost most of his jaw. Byers had willingly consumed Radithor because a doctor prescribed it and an accomplished fraudster promised it would restore his health. At roughly the same time, thousands of young American women were being poisoned by the same element, although they were not drinking expensive medicine in mansions. They were sitting in factories, painting the tiny numbers on watches and clocks. Their employers told them the work was safe. Some of those employers knew better.

The women became known as the Radium Girls. Beginning during the First World War, factories employed young women to paint luminous numbers onto watches, clocks and military instruments. The paint contained radium, a substance still regarded by much of the public as a miracle of modern science. The work was clean, skilled and unusually well paid. Some dial painters ranked among the highest-paid female workers in the country, and many were teenagers whose small hands were considered perfect for the delicate task. To working-class families, a position in a radium studio looked less like dangerous factory labour and more like winning a small lottery.

The numbers on each dial were tiny, and the camel-hair brushes quickly lost their shape. Supervisors therefore taught the women a method known as lip-pointing. They placed the brush between their lips to sharpen it, dipped it into the radioactive paint and then applied it to the dial. Lip, dip, paint. The action was repeated hundreds of times during a shift. Each time, a minute amount of radium entered the mouth. When some women asked whether this was dangerous, they were assured that it was harmless. Scientists handling radium elsewhere used protective procedures, but the young painters were instructed to put it directly onto their tongues.

The paint covered their clothes, hair and skin. At the end of a shift, the women sometimes glowed as they walked home through the dark streets. They became known as ghost girls. Far from frightening them, the glow initially seemed glamorous. Some wore their best dresses to work so they would shimmer when they went dancing later. Others painted their fingernails, faces or teeth with the luminous substance. A smile glowing green in a darkened room was considered a marvellous joke. Radium was being added to cosmetics, toothpaste and health tonics, so there appeared to be little reason for alarm. No one had told them that the light dusting their clothes was also settling permanently inside their bones.

The first warning often arrived as toothache. One of the earliest victims was Mollie Maggia, a young dial painter from the United States Radium Corporation factory in Orange, New Jersey. A painful tooth was removed, but the wound refused to heal. Then another tooth began to ache, followed by another. Ulcers spread through her mouth, her breath became foul and sections of bone began breaking away. During one examination, her jaw reportedly fractured beneath the dentist’s fingers. Large portions of it were removed without a conventional operation because the bone had become so fragile that it could be lifted out by hand.

Maggia died in 1922 at only 24 years of age after the deterioration reached the tissues of her throat and she suffered a catastrophic haemorrhage. Her death certificate incorrectly listed syphilis, a diagnosis that did more than conceal the real cause. It stained her reputation. Other women soon developed similar symptoms. Teeth loosened, wounds refused to close, spines collapsed and legs fractured without warning. Some developed enormous bone tumours. Radium had entered their bodies because it resembled calcium closely enough for the skeleton to accept it. Once lodged there, it continued releasing radiation into the surrounding bone and marrow. Their own skeletons had become the source of the attack.

The company denied responsibility. When concern began damaging business, the United States Radium Corporation commissioned an investigation. An independent study linked the illnesses to the factory, but the company rejected the findings and supported other research that produced a more convenient conclusion. The women were accused of attempting to blame the business for unrelated illnesses. Doctors struggled to diagnose them, lawyers were reluctant to challenge a powerful corporation and the slow nature of radium poisoning worked in the company’s favour. By the time symptoms appeared, years had often passed since the women had left the factory, placing their claims outside the existing legal time limit.

Dr Harrison Martland, a medical examiner in New Jersey, eventually developed tests that demonstrated radium was embedded inside the women. Their bodies released measurable radiation. Even their breath carried evidence of what had happened to them. The discovery should have ended the argument, but corporations rarely surrender simply because the truth has become inconveniently obvious. The women still had to prove their case in court, while their bones continued to crumble and the company’s lawyers continued to delay.

Grace Fryer had begun work at the Orange factory in 1917 when she was 18. By the middle of the 1920s, her teeth were falling out and her spine had been so badly damaged that she required a steel brace. She spent two years searching for a lawyer willing to represent her. Eventually, Raymond Berry accepted the case, and Fryer was joined by Katherine Schaub, Edna Hussman, Albina Larice and Quinta McDonald. Newspapers called them the five women doomed to die. When the case finally reached a hearing in 1928, several of the women were already critically ill.

The company attempted to postpone proceedings for several more months. The request caused public outrage because it appeared that the business was simply waiting for its former employees to die. The women eventually accepted an out-of-court settlement. Each received $10,000, a yearly payment of $600 and coverage of approved medical and legal costs. The United States Radium Corporation did not admit responsibility. It paid the women while refusing to acknowledge why they were dying, an arrangement that provided money without the inconvenience of remorse.

The legal battle did not end in New Jersey. In Ottawa, Illinois, women employed by the Radium Dial Company had been taught the same lip-pointing technique and were developing the same injuries. Catherine Wolfe Donohue became the central figure in their fight. By 1938, she was desperately ill and too weak to travel. When she collapsed during a hearing, proceedings were moved to her home so she could testify from her sickbed. The company appealed repeatedly after the women won. Donohue died on the 27th of July 1938, one day after its lawyers filed another appeal. In October 1939, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the company’s final challenge, leaving the lower ruling in place.

The Radium Girls did not live to enjoy the protections their cases helped create. Many died young, and many others received no compensation at all. Their suffering strengthened the principle that an employer could be held responsible for diseases caused by work, even when those diseases appeared years after the exposure. Their bodies also gave scientists invaluable information about what radiation does inside the human skeleton. This knowledge contributed to safer handling standards for radioactive materials. The women had been used as proof that radium was harmless. In death, they became proof of precisely the opposite.

There is something uniquely disturbing about their story because the danger was beautiful. It did not arrive as black smoke, a foul smell or a warning siren. It arrived as a soft glow on a watch face. The women were proud of their work, earned good wages and believed they were helping soldiers see their instruments in the darkness. Their employers converted that trust into profit and then treated their suffering as a public relations problem.

Grace Fryer said that she was fighting for the hundreds of girls who might come after her. She knew there was no cure for what had already entered her bones. The case could not save her, rebuild her spine or return the teeth she had lost. It could only force the truth into public view and make it more difficult for another company to repeat the same lie.

The Radium Girls were once called ghost girls because they left the factories glowing in the dark. More than a century later, radium remains buried in the bones of those who died, its half-life measured in approximately 1,600 years. The watches they painted have long since stopped shining. The women have not stopped warning us.