How the Radium Girls Forced Workplace Safety Reforms

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, women on the home front mobilized to meet wartime demands, joining the workforce in record numbers. In New Jersey, Illinois and Connecticut, some took on factory jobs painting watch dials, clocks and other military instruments using a radium-based substance with a glow-in-the-dark effect.

In the early 20th century, the public hadn’t yet grasped radium’s true dangers. Into the post-war era, these workers were instructed to repeatedly dip their paintbrushes and press them between their lips for finer points, in the process ingesting small doses of the radioactive element. Within a few years, many began suffering from debilitating health conditions that initially seemed minor but later ranged from necrosis of the jaw to bone cancers—and, in many cases, death.

Small groups of the so-called Radium Girls banded together to sue their employers in the 1920s, and again in the ’30s at a time when employee safety regulations did little to protect them against radiation-related injuries. Their cases generated significant media attention and paved the way to U.S. workplace safety reforms—and shaped our understanding of radiation.

“The Radium Girls were the first people in the world to highlight the dangers of these small doses of radiation,” says Kate Moore, author of The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women. “The impact that this had in the nuclear industries and medical industries is still felt today.”

After Marie and Pierre Curie successfully isolated radium in their Paris laboratory in 1898, the medical community became fascinated by its potential to treat cancer and some forms of tuberculosis. Companies began using small doses of radium in everything from cosmetics to cough syrup to food.

“The discovery of radium itself, at the turn of the 20th century, pretty much readily gets taken up in the public [imagination] as a miracle agent—a cure-all,” says Savannah Downing, an assistant professor of communication at the College of Coastal Georgia, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Radium Girls.

This public perception of radium drove several thousand young women into watch-dial factories during and after World War I. Many were grateful to have glamorous, high-paying jobs as dial painters. They often recruited family members and friends to fill vacancies and left work covered in radium dust. They became known as "ghost girls," because the radium dust made their skin, hair and clothes glow. Some even used radium paint to brighten their teeth. The radium hype persisted into the Roaring Twenties.

“As peacetime prevailed, it got more fun,” Moore says. “Some people would paint the eyes of dolls, for example, or you might paint some slippers.”

In the 1920s, seemingly healthy factory workers employed by the United States Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, who used the “lip-pointing” technique began experiencing health symptoms. At first they seemed innocuous: an aching tooth, back pain, a sore foot. Then they grew worse. 

Within months or years, their symptoms baffled doctors—spontaneous limb fractures, anemia, jaw deterioration and the development of cancerous tumors.

Led by Grace Fryer, five surviving factory workers jointly sued their former employer for damages in 1927. A mid-1920s study spearheaded by Newark pathologist Harrison Martland revealed high radioactivity levels in both living and dead dial painters, essentially diagnosing them with radium poisoning. 

All the while, Connecticut’s Waterbury Clock Company issued more than $90,000 in settlements and medical costs between 1926 and 1936 (roughly $1.7 million today) for 16 dial painters who had fallen ill.

In the late 1920s, the U.S. Radium Corporation refused to admit to any wrongdoing, insisting the women were suffering from syphilis. It also buried the results of an independent investigation led by a Harvard physician who identified radium poisoning as the likely cause of the Radium Girls’ illnesses.

The company argued that New Jersey’s two-year statute of limitations for workplace injuries exonerated them from responsibility, and the public largely believed the women were lying, Moore says. But the tide turned as the plight of the suffering Radium Girls—many young mothers, bedridden in their 20s and 30s—appeared in newspapers nationwide, with some calling them the “living dead.”

“Once it starts hitting the media, the narrative changes,” Moore says. “Then the public is on their side, and they’re shocked and horrified at what the radium companies are doing.”

The case was ultimately settled out of court but brought the issue of radiation safety into the public eye. Lip-pointing was discontinued by the 1930s.

As news of the New Jersey lawsuit spread, Radium Dial Company factory owners in Ottawa, Illinois, told workers not to worry, since they claimed New Jersey’s radium wasn’t “pure” like theirs. Still, they were being screened for radium poisoning as early as 1925, and the company withheld the results from workers. Then the women started experiencing life-threatening symptoms.

“Doctors were puzzled by my strange illness and suspected everything from malaria fever to cancer,” Ottawa factory worker Pearl Payne wrote.

After factory workers lost lawsuits in the mid-1930s, the state’s governor signed into law the new Illinois Occupational Diseases Act, which took effect in 1936. It included provisions requiring employer coverage of industrial poisoning—a direct result of the Radium Girls’ case.

Fifteen Illinois women, led by former factory worker Catherine Donohue, again sued Radium Dial Company in 1937. But the new state law applied only to future workers seeking compensation, which made their legal battle more challenging. The Illinois Industrial Commission still ruled in their favor and they received $10,000 in total compensation (roughly $228,000 today). 

The company repeatedly appealed the decision—all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case, upholding the lower court’s ruling.

New workplace safety standards protected a new generation of dial painters as the United States entered World War II, and radium-based paint was banned in the 1960s.

The Illinois case became an important stepping stone to later reforms. By 1970, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration was established under the U.S. Department of Labor to prevent injuries and illnesses resulting from hazardous working conditions.

These women directly inspired new safety guidelines during the Manhattan Project in the 1940s as the United States sought to build the world’s first atomic bombs. Studies on the dial painters contributed at least partly to U.S. government decisions to enter into international agreements that limited nuclear testing. 

According to Moore, the Radium Girls left a “legacy of protection for the whole world.”

“We are still learning lessons from it,” she says. “And it is still informing the future of humanity.”