The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

The cynical would say there was only one reason a high-profile specialist finally took up the cause. On June 7, 1925, the first male employee of the United States Radium Corporation died.

And Grace Fryer was never forgotten. She is still remembered now—you are still remembering her now. As a dial-painter, she glowed gloriously from the radium powder; but as a woman, she shines through history with an even brighter glory: stronger than the bones that broke inside her body; more powerful than the radium that killed her or the company that shamelessly lied through its teeth; living longer than she ever did on earth, because she now lives on in the hearts and memories of those who know her only from her story.Grace Fryer: the girl who fought on when all hope seemed gone; the woman who stood up for what was right, even as her world fell apart. Grace Fryer, who inspired so many to stand up for themselves.

You fight and you fall and you get up and fight some more. But there will always come a day when you cannot fight another minute more.

Radium, they noted, had a “similar chemical nature” to calcium. Thus radium “if absorbed, might have a preference for bone as a final point of fixation.” Radium was what one might call a boneseeker, just like calcium; and the human body is programmed to deliver calcium straight to the bones to make them stronger… Essentially, radium had masked itself as calcium and, fooled, the girls’ bodies had deposited it inside their bones. Radium was a silent stalker, hiding behind that mask, using its disguise to burrow deep into the women’s jaws and teeth.

We’ve got humane societies for dogs and cats, but they won’t do anything for human beings,” he spat out. “These women have souls.

Lip… Dip… Paint.

My body means nothing but pain to me,” Grace revealed, “and it might mean longer life or relief to the others, if science had it. It’s all I have to give.

Radium, he determined, was dangerous. It was just that nobody told the girls…

It is an offense against Morals and Humanity,” he concluded, “and, just incidentally, against the law.

The radium girls,” the governor announced, “deserve the utmost respect and admiration…because they battled a dishonest company, an indifferent industry, dismissive courts and the medical community in the face of certain death. I hereby proclaim September 2, 2011, as Radium Girls Day in Illinois, in recognition of the tremendous perseverance, dedication, and sense of justice the radium girls exhibited in their fight.

Yet the flip side of the coin was all the positive literature about radium. As early as 1914, specialists knew that radium could deposit in the bones of radium users and that it caused changes in their blood. These blood changes, however, were interpreted as a good thing—the radium appeared to stimulate the bone marrow to produce extra red blood cells. Deposited inside the body, radium was the gift that kept on giving. But if you looked a little closer at all those positive publications, there was a common denominator: the researchers, on the whole, worked for radium firms. As radium was such a rare and mysterious element, its commercial exploiters in fact controlled, to an almost monopolizing extent, its image and most of the knowledge about it. Many firms had their own radium-themed journals, which were distributed free to doctors, all full of optimistic research. The firms that profited from radium medicine were the primary producers and publishers of the positive literature.

What was the first case that you heard of?” asked Berry. “I don’t remember the name,” replied Roeder coldly. The dial-painters weren’t important enough for him to recall such insignificant details.

Why should I be so afflicted?” she would later ask. “I have never harmed a living thing. What have I done to be so punished?

Lip-pointing had been stopped in late 1923; Josephine Smith, the forelady, revealed: “When [the company] warning was given about pointing brushes in [our] mouths, it was explained to the girls [that] this was because the acid in the mouth spoiled the adhesive.

Sarah wasn’t even in her grave before her former company was denying it was to blame.

The girls,” remembered a local resident of the time, “were ‘good Catholic girls’ who were raised not to challenge authority.

Radium eats the bone,” an interview with Grace later said, “as steadily and surely as fire burns wood.

The element was dubbed “liquid sunshine,

What the girls had achieved was astonishing: a ground-breaking, law-changing, and life-saving accomplishment.

Wars are hungry machines—and the more you feed them, the more they consume.

Oh, that luminosity. That glow. Katherine Drinker was stunned by it. As the women undressed in the darkroom, she witnessed the dust lingering on their breasts, their undergarments, the inside of their thighs. It scattered everywhere, as intimate as a lover’s kiss, leaving its trace as it wound around the women’s limbs, across their cheeks, down the backs of their necks, and around their waists… Every inch of them was marked by it, by its feather-light dance that touched their soft and unseen skin. It was spectacular—and tenacious, once it had infiltrated the women’s clothing.

Gods can be kind. Loving. Benevolent. Yet as the playwright George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “The gods of old are constantly demanding human sacrifices.

That was the thing. The worry. It put her “in a very precarious mental condition.”20 Her former company, keeping tabs on her, put it more harshly—they called her “mentally deranged.”21 “When you’re sick and can’t get around much,” Katherine herself said, “things are different. Your friends aren’t the same to you. They’re nice to you and all that, but you’re not one of them. I get so discouraged sometimes that I wish…well, I don’t wish pleasant things.”22

Yet she was brave about it. “It had to be done,” she went on, “had to be told, or else how would we be able to fight for the justice that was due us?”13

With a half-life of 1,600 years, radium could take its time to make itself known.

The cynical would say there was only one reason a high-profile specialist finally took up the cause. On June 7, 1925, the first male employee of the United States Radium Corporation died. “The first case that was called to my attention,” Martland later remarked, “was a Dr.

Within sixty hours, Sarah’s bones caused exposure on the film: white fog-like patches against the ebony black. Just as the girls’ glow had once done, as they walked home through the streets of Orange after work, her bones had made a picture: an eerie, shining light against the dark.

the hospitals where she’d been treated refused to release her records.

the industry got away with murder.

The decay in Irene’s jaw was eating her alive, bit by bit.