Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women," by Kate Moore.
Katherine could see that the powder got everywhere; there was dust all over the studio. Even as she watched, little puffs of it seemed to hover in the air before settling on the shoulders or hair of a dial-painter at work. To her astonishment, it made the girls themselves gleam.
Katherine, like many before her, was entranced by it. It wasn’t just the glow — it was radium’s all-powerful reputation. Almost from the start, the new element had been championed as “the greatest find of history.” When scientists had discovered, at the turn of the century, that radium could destroy human tissue, it was quickly put to use to battle cancerous tumors, with remarkable results. Consequently — as a life-saving and thus, it was assumed, health-giving element — other uses had sprung up around it. All of Katherine’s life, radium had been a magnificent cure-all, treating not just cancer, but hay fever, gout, constipation…anything you could think of. Pharmacists sold radioactive dressings and pills; there were also radium clinics and spas for those who could afford them. People hailed its coming as predicted in the Bible: “The sun of righteousness [shall] arise with healing in his wings, and ye shall go forth and gambol as calves of the stall.”
For another claim of radium was that it could restore vitality to the elderly, making “old men young.” One aficionado wrote: “Sometimes I am halfway persuaded that I can feel the sparkles inside my anatomy.” Radium shone “like a good deed in a naughty world.”
Its appeal was quickly exploited by entrepreneurs. Katherine had seen advertisements for one of the most successful products, a radium-lined jar to which water could be added to make it radioactive: wealthy customers drank it as a tonic; the recommended dose was five to seven glasses a day. But as some of the models retailed for $200 ($3,700), it was a product far out of Katherine’s reach. Radium water was drunk by the rich and famous, not working-class girls from Newark.
But her new surroundings didn’t improve her condition. Hazel had no idea what was wrong with her: the weight was dropping off her, she felt weak, and her jaw ached something rotten. She was so concerned that in the end she asked the company doctor at her new firm to examine her, but he was unable to diagnose her illness.
The one thing she could be assured of, at least, was that it wasn’t her work with radium that was the cause. In October 1920, her former employer was featured in the local news. The residue from radium extraction looked like seaside sand, and the company had offloaded this industrial waste by selling it to schools and playgrounds to use in their children’s sandboxes; kids’ shoes were reported to have turned white because of it, while one little boy complained to his mother of a burning sensation in his hands. Yet, in comments that made reassuring reading, von Sochocky pronounced the sand “most hygienic” for children to play in, “more beneficial than the mud of world- renowned curative baths.”
And from that strange white fog Martland now understood another critical concept. Sarah was dead—but her bones seemed very much alive: making impressions on photographic plates; carelessly emitting measurable radioactivity. It was all due, of course, to the radium. Sarah’s own life may have been cut short, but the radium inside her had a half-life of 1,600 years. It would be shooting out its rays from Sarah’s bones for centuries, long after she was gone. Even though it had killed her, it kept on bombarding her body “every day, every week, month after month, year after year.”
It is bombarding her body to this day.
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.
But not everyone was pleased with the possibility of bringing the firm to its knees. The town "bitterly resented these women's charges as giving a 'black eye' to the community." Ottawa was a close-knit and folksy town, but the girls soon realized that when it turned against you, it turned hard. "They weren't treated too nice," commented a relative of Marie with understatement.
After all, Radium Dial had long been a valued employer. With the country in the middle of its worst-ever economic depression - what some were now calling the Great Depression - communities were even more protective of the firms that could give them work and wages. The women found they were disbelieved, ignored and even shunned when they spoke out about their ailments and the cause.
"Have you an opinion as to whether this condition is permanent or temporary?"
"Permanent," he answered swiftly. Catherine dropped her head: this is forever.
"Have you an opinion," Grossman asked now, "if this is fatal?" Dalitsch hesitated and "glanced meaningfully" toward Catherine, who was only meters from him. Grossman's question hung in the air, suspended in time. Five days ago, after the examinations in Chicago, Catherine's three doctors had indeed determined that her condition had reached its "permanent, incurable, and terminal stage." Yet the physicians, who in all kindness sought to spare her, had not told Catherin Donohue.
"In her presence?" Dalitsch now asked, uncertainly.
But he had said enough. He had said enough in the way he had paused. Catherine "sobbed, slipped down in her chair, and covered her face" with her hands. At first, silent tears ran down her cheeks, but then, as though the full weight of what he hadn't said hit her, "screamed in hysteria." She screamed aloud, as she thought of leaving Tom and her children; as she thought of leaving this life; as she thought of what was coming in her future. She hadn't know; she had had hope. She had had faith. Catherine had truly believed she was not going to due - but Dalitsch's face said otherwise; she could see it in his eyes. So she screamed, and the broken voice which had struggled to speak was now made powerful in her fear and distress. Tom "broke down and sobbed" at the sound of his wife's cries.
The scream was a watershed; after it, Catherine could not keep herself upright. She collapsed and "would have fallen had not a physician nearby caught her." Dr. Weiner had leaped to his feet to hold her up, and as he did so, Tom seemed released from his paralysis. He rushed to Catherine's side as she lay slumped in her chair. While Weiner felt for her pulse, Tom's concern was only for Catherine. He cradled her head with his hand, touched her shoulder to try to bring her back to herself; back to him. Catherine was sobbing hard, her mouth wide open, showing the destruction inside: the gaps where her teeth should have been. But she didn't care who saw; all she could see was Dalitsch's face in her mind. Fatal. This is fatal. It was the first time she'd been told.
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