Rosi EfthimUncategorized

New Jersey has a long, and awful history with industrial pollution and its residents have suffered for it. But here’s a part of NJ history – with brave women who fought back though they could barely walk, a landmark case and a milestone in regulation and labor safety – and I knew almost nothing about it. I went to school in New York; talk to me about Love Canal. I didn’t know about the Radium Girls, or the Radium Superfund sites in Bloomfield, Glen Ridge, Montclair, West Orange and East Orange. Read on, and if you know more than I did, feel free to chime in. – Rosi

Earlier this year, Mae Keane died in Middlebury, Connecticut. She was, at 107, the last of the Radium Girls.

Had she been more obedient, more apt to be bullied into compliance by her bosses and the corporation for which she worked at 18, she might have ended up like most of the other Radium Girls. Some of them never made it out of their teens. One young woman was sent to the dentist to have a tooth pulled. One yank and her whole jaw came out. Women collapsed; their legs suddenly giving out, their bones porous and breaking underneath them. There was cancer. Early death. And the company tried to blame the women. Typical.

In the early part of the 20th century, there were jobs for young women – in Orange, NJ; Waterbury, CT; Long Island, NY; Ottawa, Canada – to apply glow-in-the-dark paint to the numbers on wristwatch dials. It was fine, exacting work, thought to be something women, and their dainty hands, were suited for. To keep the brush tips sharp enough for detail work, the “girls” were told to sharpen them with their lips or tongue.

It was radium paint. The owners and scientists, who knew more about the new substance, didn’t expose themselves to it. They used lead screens, masks and tongs. The women were never warned.

May Keane didn’t like it much; the taste and texture of the paint was unpleasant, and so was the tedium of the job. Her boss suggested she quit and she did. Within two decades, she lost all her teeth.

Now we come to a part of New Jersey history I knew nothing about; the case of radium dial painter Grace Fryer and her colleagues, and they refused to be bullied too. Fryer worked at U.S. Radium Corporation factory in Orange, NJ from 1917 until 1920, when she left for a job as a bank teller. In 1923 she began to experience health problems. By then, other dial painters were also sick; some had died. On their death certificates, doctors were urged by the companies to cite as cause of death syphilis, a notorious sexually transmitted disease of the time that cast aspersions on the virtue of the young women. The companies – including U.S. Radium Corp in Orange – denied their employees were or ever had been in danger from licking radium of the tiny paintbrushes. They employed “experts” to create a disinformation campaign, and shuck off any responsibility for the sickness and death of their factory girls.

What happened to the New Jersey Radium Girls? Well, they all died by the 1930s, but before they did, their cause was taken up by muckrakers and social reformers. And here, because I’m just learning about all this myself, I’ll turn you over to the stuff I’m reading now, the first of which is a great series 5 years ago at Daily Kos:

How Regulation Came to Be: Radium Girls – Part 1 (dsteffen, Daily Kos, 2009)

How Regulation Came to Be: Radium Girls – Part II (dsteffen, Daily Kos, 2009)

How Regulation Came to Be: Radium Girls – Part III (dsteffen, Daily Kos, 2009)

Radium Girls (play, D.W. Gregory)

Glow in the Dark Tragedy (Laura Lee Carter, American History, 2007)

How the Media Rescued the Radium Girls in 1928 (Bill Kovarik and Mark Neuzil, scholarly work)