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It’s 1938 and Catherine Donahue lies propped up on the couch in her living room, dying. She’s surrounded, not by doctors, not hospice nurses, not even her loved ones, but by members of the Illinois Industrial Commission. They’re conducting a hearing, something that should have been happening in a court room, was happening in a court room until Catherine collapsed, all 71 pounds of her and had to be carried out, the hearing finished instead in her living room. A man from the commission asks her a question. She looks to her lawyer who nods. But Catherine is too weak to answer. Instead, she gestures feebly towards a box on the table next to her, a box containing pieces of her own jaw bone. Catherine Donahue was a Radium Girl, employed to paint glow in the dark numbers on watch faces and dials in the 1920s and 30s. Assured that the paint was safe, the girls were instructed to shape their paintbrushes into sharp points with their own lips. But, turns out, ingesting radioactive radium paint isn’t safe at all, and as the women became sick and sicker and died, the companies they worked for chose to gaslight them, refusing to take responsibility all while lining their pockets with profits. But these women fought back, standing up while laying down and their fight set an important precedent we can’t afford to forget. Let’s fix that.

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. This week’s topic was suggested to me by no less than 3 different people all within a few weeks of each other. So I basically had to cover this one but also, it was already on my list because this is a story that desperately needs to be told and it seems a fitting topic to kick off Women’s History month. This story is a cautionary tale. Here we see the devastating consequences of an overly patriarchal society, one that does not care about women’s health, one that does not listen to women’s complaints, one that values money over the lives of women and other marginalized groups. This is a society run almost exclusively by wealthy white males, a society not all that different from our society today. You know what, I’m getting on my soap box already, I can't stop it, I gotta say it… this, this story, this is why diversity, equity, and inclusion are important. Because if only one group is making all the decisions, everyone else is slipping through the cracks. And that’s what’s going to happen in the story I tell you today. The radium girls are going to slip through the cracks. But they aren’t just going to fall, no, they’re going to grab on, and they’re going to dangle there long enough to make a difference. This story reminds me a lot of the Triangle Factory fire episode I did, that was episode 77 if you missed it. Except, in that story, which happened a decade or two before this one, those women did not get justice. In fact, the company they worked for actually profited from their deaths, collecting insurance money for every life lost. Thankfully, that is not the case in this story. In this story the women will fight and the women will win but it will not be easy and many of them will not live long enough to see that hard earned success.

Before I get into the history here, I need to get a little sciencey with you. This story deals with radiation poisoning. And, if you’re like me and you don’t just accept complex concepts like “oh, okay, radiation poisoning, got it, except not really” then you may be wondering, what exactly is radiation? Radiation is simply energy that moves from one place to another as waves or particles meaning it can move through the air. Not all radiation is dangerous. In fact, most of it is not. The sun has radiation, solar radiation, without which life on Earth would not be possible. Radios, microwaves, use non dangerous radiation. The non dangerous kind is called non-ionizing radiation. Microwave ovens use non-ionizing radiation. The atoms don’t break apart, they stay together they just vibrate which produces heat. They vibrate the atoms in your food, and those vibrations create friction which makes your food hot. But the atoms don’t break apart as this is happening. The dangerous type of radiation is called ionizing radiation and in this kind, the atoms do break apart, electrons are released from the atoms, creating ions which is why it’s called ionizing radiation.

Ionizing radiation, this dangerous kind, it has a lot of really helpful uses too. We can use it to create energy. It also has medical uses which we’ll get into later. But it damages the cells in our bodies because it messes with things on an atomic level. Right, it scrambles our cells basically, our DNA. Not all elements produce ionizing radiation. Most elements are stable, their atoms are balanced by the number of protons and neutrons they have. They’re balanced and the atoms hold together. They don’t split apart. Some elements, like uranium for example, are unstable. Their protons and neutrons are not balanced and so they can’t hold all the subatomic particles together. They fall apart. And when this happens, when they fall apart, it releases ionizing radiation. These unstable elements are, what we call, radioactive.

Okay, hopefully you’re still with me. We didn’t know anything about radioactive elements for most of human history. We encountered them. We just didn’t know that they were special. For example, there is a town in what is now the Czech Republic called Joachimsthal that is famous for its silver ores. In the 1500s, these silver mines in Joachimsthal supplied all of Europe with the silver they used to make coins. So much so that they actually named the coins after Joachimsthal. They called them thalers because of the thal part at the end of Joachimsthal . Let me see how many times I can say Joachimsthal, goodness. I’m probably saying it wrong. Anyway, they called these coins thalers and that is actually the origin of the word dollar, fun fact. But, in these silver mines, was a different type of ore, one they called pitchblende. And it was kind of a bummer when the miners struck pitchblende because it usually meant the end of the silver ore in that vein. It was such a bummer they colloquially called it “bad luck rock.” But it turns out, pitchblende wasn’t just some useless, valueless bad luck rock, it was actually uranium ore which, turns out, is worth more than silver. But no one knows that yet.

Although the silver miners have no interest in pitchblende, the nerds eventually do. One nerd in particular named Martin Klaproth, a German chemist, was the first to isolate uranium from pitchblende ore in 1789. He’s like cool, here’s a new thing, still doesn’t know it's radioactive or even what radioactive means. A hundred years later, in 1895, x-rays are discovered by a German physicist, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen (runt-gin). And this is very exciting. The scientific community is all in a tizzy over this. Remember, Thomas Edison even jumps on board, experimenting with x-rays until his assistant dies and he nearly goes blind and he’s like, actually, nah. A French physicist named Henri Becquerel was also excited about x-rays because they reminded him of something he’d been experimenting with already. He had been studying fluorescence and phosphorescence using uranium. After x-rays are discovered, he starts to theorize that what he has been observing is uranium absorbing sunlight and then spitting it back out essentially, as x-rays. Now this theory is wrong but it does lead him to accidentally discover radioactivity. Becquerel isn’t just a physicist, he’s also a photographer. Bit of an artsy nerd. And so to test this theory, he wraps a photographic plate which was like the precursor to film, this was what was used as like a film negative in the 1800s, he wraps it in black paper and he puts some uranium salt crystals on top and he sets it in the sun. And then when he takes the paper off and develops the plate into a photograph, he sees the outline of the uranium crystals. And he’s like cool, it penetrated the black paper, it must be x-rays just like I thought. That’s what x-rays do. Still wrong. He stashes the photographic plate and the uranium salts setup in a drawer and gets busy with other stuff. After about a week, he opens that drawer and he’s like “oh yeah my uranium plates, hmm I wonder…” and he develops the photographs and the outline of the uranium salt crystals is way more clear than ever before even without any sunlight. And that’s when he realizes it's the uranium itself that is emitting the radiation and it’s not x-rays, it’s some totally different type of radiation.

Enter Pierre and Marie Curie. Bequerel discovers uranium emits radiation in 1896, by 1898 they catch on and they’re like “cool, move over Bequerel, we got this.” These nerds are on board and they want to know more. I might do a Marie Curie mini fix, I’ll keep you posted, because she fascinates me. She’s actually the one who came up with the word radioactivity. And, studying the radioactivity of uranium, she realizes, you know what, it’s actually way less radioactive than pitchblende itself, which remember is where uranium comes from. She’s like “hey, there has to be something else radioactive in pitchblende besides uranium.” So she and her husband Pierre start experimenting with pitchblende and sure enough, they discover another radioactive element, one they call polonium. And polonium is 330 times more radioactive than uranium. But after they’ve extracted the uranium and the polonium from the pitchblende, the liquid that is left behind is still super radioactive. So they’re like, okay there’s another one in there, even more radioactive than polonium and they name it radium.

These discoveries were huge because they’re part of what helped scientists realize that atoms were not the smallest particles, that atoms were actually made of subatomic particles that could break away and do crazy things. They did crazy things to human flesh, causing burns in some cases. It wasn’t long at all before radium was being used to successfully treat cancer because it significantly shrinks the size of cancerous tumors. This was a precursor to modern radiation therapy which no longer uses radium, now we use like man made radioactive elements instead. But anyway, they think right away, you know, radium is the cure for cancer. This stuff is incredible. They are singing its praises, it’s this miraculous thing. They do not realize initially, that this type of radiation, ionizing radiation, radioactivity, yeah it shrinks tumors but it also kills you. It damages the DNA in your cells on an atomic level which can actually cause cancer, the irony, tissue damage, genetic mutations, sterilization, aplastic anemia, which is when your bone marrow stops producing blood cells. This is how Marie Curie eventually died 30 years after discovering radium. But in those 30 years, people are mostly stoked about the potential of radium, as a cancer treatment, in cosmetic products, creams, toothpaste, soap, even in food. People thought it was super healthy. The New York Herald reported in October of 1921 quote “Radium to extend life to 100 years, so predicts Dr. C. Everett Field… success seen in tests, radioactive treatment already adds full decade to the human span,” end quote.

Another exciting way people were using radium was in paint, because paint with radium in it glows in the dark. Now, radium itself doesn’t glow in the dark, it’s the stuff it’s mixed with like zinc sulfide which is a phosphor. As the radium radioactive decays, breaks down, it energizes the zinc sulfide which glows green like classic glow in the dark green. And this was super useful for painting watch faces and dials for airplanes during World War I because they glowed in the dark, you could see the time or whatever airplane stats are, altitude, I don’t know but you could see them in the dark. This was called self-luminous paint and it was in high demand during the first part of the 20th century mostly due to World War I.

Starting in 1917, a company called the United States Radium Corporation started mining for radium in Colorado and Utah for the purposes of making paint. Now, I know this sounds like a government entity, it’s not but it was a defense contractor. So they were contracted by the US military to provide radium painted watches and dials and whatnot for the military. They mine the radium ore, they extract it and purify it, and they turn it into luminous paint which was called Undark. But they go even farther than just making the paint. They are the total package. At their plant in Orange, New Jersey they also employ around 300 people, mostly women, to paint watch faces and instruments with this glow in the dark paint. Mostly women because women tend to be more dextrous than men and so they could paint these itty bitty numbers on things. Same reason mostly women were employed at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Sewing also requires dexterity. And this watch painting gig was a very appealing job for women at the time. There weren’t many job opportunities for women in 1917 and most of them paid very little. This was skilled labor and it was relatively high paying for the time. They earned a penny and a half per dial and painted around 250 dials per shift which comes out to $3.75 a day. That’s the equivalent of around $92 today. Holy inflation. But, I mean that’s not terrible when considering the options women had at the time. A 1922 newspaper advertisement by the Radio Dial Studio in Illinois reads quote “Radium Dial Studio requires the services of several girls for studio work. Ideal location and surroundings. Unusually clean and attractive work. Good pay while learning,” end quote. And so you can see here they are specifically targeting quote “girls” to come and do this work.

The women who did this work were led to believe that the radium paint was perfectly safe to handle. They were actually encouraged to point their paintbrushes with their lips. So they used camel hair paintbrushes that after a few strokes would lose their shape, they wouldn’t be pointy anymore. And you needed a pointy paintbrush to paint these tiny little numbers. So the powers that be told the girls to quote “lip, dip, paint.” Now they could have used a rag to do this but that would have taken more time and materials and time is money. So they lipped, dipped, and painted as instructed. And it was fine. Because they were told the paint was safe. They were so misled that they actually painted their nails and teeth with it to make them glow. And so they are ingesting this paint all day, and thinking that it’s just fine. And maybe you’re thinking, well hey, they made a mistake. You know, the company did think it was safe. They weren’t lying to them or intentionally misleading them. But then explain this to me. While the girls are up there sucking on their paintbrushes, the chemists in the lab part of this operation actually extracting the radium used lead screens and tongs and wore masks when handling it. Now why would they take such precautions if the radium was perfectly safe to ingest? According to an article by Arlene Balkansky for the Library of Congress Blogs quote “Well into the 1920s, the dangers of radium were not known to the public, although some executives and scientists in the industry were increasingly aware and protected themselves in the factories where the women worked,” end quote. Okayyy but what about the women? They couldn’t give them a heads up? No, they did the exact opposite. They encouraged them to put the stuff in their mouths. That is inexcusable.

Now, in the beginning, these women were loving it. They had a great job, they made good money, they had luminous smiles from painting their teeth with the paint. Their hair, skin, and clothing literally glowed after work from the paint dust. According to Encyclopedia Britannica quote “Many of the women wore their best dresses on the job so the fabric would shine brilliantly when they went dancing after work,” end quote. They became known as “ghost girls” because of this glowing effect. And that, I get chills thinking about that term “ghost girls,” because they were glowing, like ghosts right, they glowed and it was cool, they wanted to glow. But then you think about a ghost as the spirit of someone who is dead and it’s like this super eery foreshadowing of what’s to come. Because these women’s days were numbered already and there was nothing they could do about it. They would come to be called, not ghost girls, but living dead women. They were alive, but they were as good as dead.

Dentists were the first to notice a pattern of issues amongst the New Jersey dial painters. Amelia, who went by Mollie, Maggia was one of the first. She went to the dentist complaining of a toothache. The tooth had to be extracted along with the one next to it. Then, painful bloody, pussy ulcers developed where the teeth had been. So already at this point the dentists are looking at that like, hmm, that’s not normal. That’s not usually how this goes. This spreads throughout her mouth and lower jaw and it gets so bad that her lower jaw actually had to be removed. But it continues to spread throughout her body these ulcers and just painful sores and ugh and she eventually dies of a massive hemorrhage in September of 1922. And doctors are puzzled. They’ve never seen anything quite like this but they, you know, they gotta look like they know what they’re doing so they say she died of syphilis. And this will become a recurring diagnosis as the death toll mounts. “Syphilis, she had syphilis, just a loose woman with syphilis.” And you can see how that misdiagnosis, it was shameful, it cast shame upon the women, smeared their reputations, right, they were sleeping around, it’s their own fault, serves them right. That sort of thing.

More and more women who work at the Orange, New Jersey plant start experiencing similar issues. They develop anemia, bone fractures, cancer, and the same necrosis of the jaw that Maggia had which comes to be called radium jaw where your jaw literally just like rots out of your head. And they’re going to the doctor for these symptoms and being just totally gaslighted by the company. The company’s like “no, it’s not the radium paint we told you to put in your mouth, it’s actually from the x-rays you had done when you went to the doctor cause your jaw was rotting off. The x-rays you got after your jaw started rotting off are what made your jaw rot off” Make that make sense. But that’s what they told them. And here’s the thing, they are going to see doctors that they were referred to by the company, the United States Radium Corporation where they work. The company told them which quote doctors to go see and these doctors didn’t even have licenses to practice medicine in some cases. Some of them had no medical training. The company absolutely refused to believe that the litany of health issues these women were experiencing was caused by the radium paint to the point where they set up like basically fake doctors as like a ruse to trick them into thinking everything was fine when it very clearly was not.

By 1924 fifty women who worked at the plant were sick and 12 had died and the company is still like “uh, uh, nope” like with their hands over their ears just like “nah, nah, nah, nah I can’t hear you.” According to Encyclopedia Britannica quote “facing a downturn in business because of the growing controversy, the company finally commissioned an independent study of the matter, which concluded that the painters had died from the effects of radium exposure. Refusing to accept the report’s findings, the company commissioned additional studies that came to the opposite conclusion, and it decried the girls who had taken ill. The public continued to assume that radium was safe. In 1925 a pathologist named Harrison Martland developed a test that proved conclusively that radium had poisoned the watch painters by destroying their bodies from the inside. The radium industry tried to discredit Martland’s findings, but the Radium Girls themselves fought back. Many knew that their days were numbered, but they wanted to do something to help their colleagues still working with the deadly substance,” end quote.

This is, it reminds me of the cannabis episode I did recently. Where they commission reports, scientific findings, about the safety of cannabis or in this case radium and if the results aren’t what they want, they just like toss them in the trash and find someone who will tell them what they want to hear. That’s not how science works you guys. But by 1925, five women in particular were ready to take a stand. They are dying. There is no way of saving them and yet they dedicate their final years to justice. Justice for the women who have suffered and lost their lives and change for the women still working in the plant. It takes 2 years for them to find a lawyer willing to take on the case. In 1927, they attempt to sue the US Radium Corporation, their employer, claiming that they were intentionally misled to believe that ingesting the radium paint was safe. But 5 young dying women in 1927 suing a huge corporation, that’s not an easy task. The New York World newspaper published this article in May of 1928 headlined “Five Women Doomed to Die” it reads quote “In New Jersey, there are five women who have for a year tried to obtain a hearing in the courts. They are crippled by radium poisoning contracted in the plant of the United States radium corporation at Orange, New Jersey where they were employed to paint numerals on the dials of watches. 13 other women who worked in that plant are already dead. These five women are doomed. Six physicians, including Dr. Cecil K. Drinker of the Harvard Medical School, have examined them and agree that they have only a short time to live. They are trying to sue the company for damages. The first suit was filed in the New Jersey Supreme Court on May 18, 1927 - a year ago. As the matter now stands, the Jersey courts have decreed that they must wait until September 24, 1928, this coming September, before they could have a hearing to determine whether their case can be tried at all. It is not certain whether these women can live that long,” end quote. Because of course they aren’t going to make it easy for them. They put it off a year and a half knowing these women’s days are numbered. And you know they’re hoping, you know, they’re just going to die before this thing goes to trial.

According to Wikipedia quote “The litigation moved slowly even after the women found a lawyer, and by the time of their first court appearance in January 1928, two women were bedridden, and none of them could raise their arms to take an oath. The five factory workers involved in the suit were dubbed "the radium girls"– Grace Fryer, Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub, and sisters Quinta McDonald and Albina Larice. The US Radium Corporation denied any wrongdoing, but the settlement for each of the Radium Girls was $10,000 (equivalent to $185,000 today) and a $600 per year annuity (equivalent to $11,000) for all of their lives, and all medical and legal expenses incurred would also be paid by the company. All five of the women were dead by the 1930s,” end quote. Okay so they got some money out of it, you might consider that a win. In a way it’s a win, but, somehow the company avoided admitting guilt. Which means nothing really changes. Those women got some money, they couldn’t enjoy it, they died within a few years. But it didn’t change the industry because the company denied any wrongdoing. And so this keeps happening.

Back in 1922, another one of these companies had popped up in Ottawa, Illinois, called the Radium Dial Company. They also employed mostly young women to paint the dials and they also told them to use the lip, dip, paint method of putting the brushes in their mouths to get a sharp point. Now, they were a few years behind the other company in New Jersey. Remember, that one got started in 1917. So they are 5 years behind. And because all of the issues the girls over there were having were being kept quiet by the company, and written off as syphilis and caused by the x-rays they were getting to try and diagnose the issues, the girls working the same job in Illinois don’t know about the dangers either. The court cases, though, the 5 Radium Girls court cases starting in 1928, that was very public and highly reported on. And the girls in Illinois would have heard about it. But, their company employed a gaslighting strategy as well. According to Wikipedia quote “When word of the New Jersey women and their suits appeared in local newspapers, the women [in Illinois] were told that the radium was safe and that employees in New Jersey were showing signs of viral infections. A co-founder of the [US Radium Corporation], George Willis lectured the women on radium and how it wasn't dangerous. Inventor of the paint and student to Marie and Pierre Curie, Sabin von Sochocky told workers that the paint lacked hazardous ingredients. They were also told the radium in the paint was being diluted and could not harm their health. Assured by their employers that the radium was safe, they returned to work as usual,” end quote. Fun fact, Sabin von Sochocky who invented the radium paint and assured them it was safe, died of radium poisoning himself, in 1928.

So even though these women are dying and suing over in New Jersey, it’s business as usual in Illinois. They are lip, dip, painting all day long. And sure enough, they begin to suffer from the same symptoms. They begin asking for compensation for medical and dental bills starting in 1927 which is continuously denied by the company. And it would be another 10 years, not until 1937 that 5 of these women would take the Illinois based Radium Dial Company to court. Led by former employee Catherine Donahue, they found a lawyer named Leonard Grossman who agreed to take the case without pay because at this point the women suing were too sick to work and so they didn’t have any money. But Grossman takes the case and they have a hearing with the Illinois Industrial Commission or IIC that actually had to happen at Catherine Donahue’s house, because by this time, she’s too sick to sit in court. She’s bedridden, an inch from death. She tried, actually, according to a Chicago Daily News article from February 1938, she showed up to court with a box containing bone fragments from her own jaw and weighing around 70 pounds but soon collapsed and fell from her chair. So they had to do the hearing at her house while she is like lying in bed actively dying. There are photos. It’s crazy.

Also by this time, conveniently the Radium Dial Company had closed its doors in Illinois and moved to New York. The IIC rules in favor of the women. They rule that the Radium Dial Company is at fault and that the women are owed compensation. However, they refused to cross state boundaries in order to get that compensation for the women, remember the company isn’t based in Illinois anymore and this is the Illinois Industrial Commission. They’re like “yeah, we’re the Illinois Industrial Commission not the New York Industrial Commission. They do owe you money, but, oh well, they moved to New York so, too bad. ” In a matter of words, that was what happened. They did have a $10,000 deposit from the company which is like $225,000 today, that had been handed over earlier for something insurance related, I don’t really get it but that’s all they were able to get to actually pay the women with and so many of them never received any money. But that didn’t really matter because they died soon after anyway. What mattered about this time around was that the company was held responsible. They weren’t allowed to just be like “not our fault, bye.” They were deemed responsible for intentionally misleading the women that radium was safe. And the company, of course, tried to appeal that immediately and, thankfully, were denied. Balkansky writes quote “Donohue survived long enough to know that the company’s first appeal before the Commission was unanimously denied. She died on July 27, 1938, the day after Radium Dial’s attorneys filed their next appeal. On October 23, 1939, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the company’s final appeal and the lower court ruling was upheld. The Ottawa dial-painters had a measure of justice after Donohue’s death,” end quote. She had two young children you guys, a 5 year old and a 3 year old, when she died such a senseless and avoidable death driven by greed. And she spent her last moments fighting to fix it, not for her, there was no hope for her, but for others, for us.

Now this might not seem that important to us today, this court case. Like, of course the company was at fault, of course the women were entitled to compensation, duh. But at the time, believe it or not, that was quite groundbreaking. It established a precedent for individual workers to be able to sue their employers for compensation when they were abused at work. I mean these women were abused. They were intentionally misled to believe that radium paint was safe to ingest just to make them more efficient at work, so they could paint watch dials faster, so the company could sell more watch dials, make more money. The companies willingly traded these women’s lives for their own profits. And the case of Catherine Donahue, the ruling in that case, made that kind of disgusting behavior by corporations a little harder to pull off. Industrial safety standards improved. Painting watch dials with radium paint was still a thing up until like the 1970s, believe it or not, but the workers were warned of the dangers of radium and instructed to take proper safety precautions. They wore protective gear and they didn’t put the paint in their mouths anymore for God’s sake. With the Radium Girls cases setting a precedent, in 1949 Congress passed a bill that entitled all workers suffering from work related diseases to compensation. And it was just a handful of sick and dying women who made that happen, 5 in New Jersey, and 5 in Illinois, living dead women, who fell through the cracks and held on, just long enough to make a difference.

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.

Information used in this episode was sourced from Library of Congress Blogs, Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, The International Atomic Energy Agency, the US Department of Energy, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the American Physical Society, and Northern Public Radio. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.

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