The Radium Girls

TW: Medical Neglect, Graphic Content

There’s a photograph I can’t stop seeing:

A small house in Illinois, 1938. A woman, Catherine Donohue, is propped against pillows, her profile pared down by illness until she seems almost to float. Beside her, her husband sits with the dogged neatness of grief—hands folded, shoulders square. A commissioner, pen in hand, leans forward with the anxious impatience of a guest who knows the furniture was not built for cross-examination. And Catherine, queenly even in a cotton nightgown, gives testimony that does not belong to the room at all. It is meant for posterity.

Her words: It is too late for me, but not for you.

That sentence is the hinge of this story and also the keel, the thing that lets it move through time without capsizing. It is why I cannot tell this as a brief or a timeline or a stoic list of holdings and citations. It must be a room, with a woman in it; it must be a room we can walk into, and a room we agree not to leave the moment we feel uncomfortable. It must be a room where we promise, aloud, that we see them.

Because Catherine was not alone. Her name sits among dozens that did not travel as far: Grace Fryer, Katherine Schaub, Albina and Quinta Larice, Edna Hussman, Mollie Maggia. Teenagers and young women—sisters, daughters, nascent mothers—who in the 1910s and 20s painted radium-laced numbers onto watch dials so soldiers could read the time in the dark.

For years their faces have returned to me—not as plaintiffs in casebooks but as girls laughing under factory lights, as sisters wiping luminous dust from each other’s collars, as daughters dropping coins into their mothers’ palms on payday. I want to tell you about them now not as an antiquarian item, but as a reminder of what it costs to be believed.

Imagine 1917 in Orange, New Jersey. The streets carry the last habitual glow of gaslight, a softness nostalgic even then; the playground near the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation glows the brightest. The girls leave the playground by twos and threes, hairpins glinting, cuffs dusted, and drift under the trees with the giddiness of the well-paid. Their dresses show a ghost of green; their hair flashes as though threaded with slender stars. Neighbors call them the shining girls. Children point and giggle. The girls pretend not to notice, and notice everything.

Most are not far from school—sixteen, seventeen, twenty on the outside. Some come from immigrant families; some are daughters of machinists or tailors; a few are recent arrivals themselves. Dial painting feels like a stroke of fortune. 

Inside the studio, there is the intimacy of many hands doing the same small thing. The tables are set up along long windows; the brushes, finicky instruments prone to feathering, must be taught to keep their shape. Supervisors explain the method with the brisk efficiency of men who have never painted a thing. Lip, dip, paint. Point the brush with your lips; dip into the luminous mixture; paint the numbers, each no wider than a grain of rice. Repeat until the minute hand makes a circle. 

And then the powder: a shimmer that settles the way flour settles in a warm bakery, a floating dust that gets into the whorls of your fingerprints and the crease at your throat, that makes its own Milky Way in the bar of sun near the window. At the end of a shift, it clings to everything—hair, lashes, cuffs. Supervisors brush it from the girls’ shoulders and save the sweepings for the next day’s batch. Still, the light follows. Dresses glimmer in bureau drawers. When they tip their heads toward the gas lamps at home, their teeth carry a private moonrise.

At dances they become a spectacle. They glow under the chandeliers like friends of the band. Some dot their nails with the paint—bright-as-the-aisle fireflies for a Saturday night; others touch a speck to a tooth, a gleam to catch a boy’s laugh. The glow is not, at first, a burden. It is a novelty and a pleasure, an urban myth you get to live inside.

Dentists are the first to understand what they are seeing because mouths tell the truth. They see a pattern: ulcers that refuse to close, gums that bleed at the suggestion of pressure, a metallic breath, and then—almost unbearably—the give of bone beneath a gloved finger. A molar will not heal; a second tooth comes out as if the jaw has decided to loosen its grip on its own architecture. A knob of necrotic bone peeks through a socket like a white matchhead, then fragments. The infection moves as if urged by some invisible current, and the jaw, that supposedly stubborn hinge of appetite and speech, becomes friable as chalk.

The case of Mollie Maggia—twenty-four, pretty, not especially different from anyone else at her table—draws a circle around the horror. A toothache; an extraction; a wound that will not close. A second extraction; the wound widens, angry and bright. A dentist prods to locate the trouble, expecting an abscess or a tumor, and the bone itself, the unthinkable solidity of it, gives way beneath his finger. 

In the months that follow, the jaw dissolves piece by terrible piece. The dentist, with a care that is no match for the pathology, removes what he can by hand. The mouth becomes a wound rather than an organ. An ulcer breaches the wall of a major vessel. Mollie dies hemorrhaging, a river let loose, at an age when most of her classmates are still trying out signatures for new names. 

Someone—whether out of malice, ignorance, or a desire to appease a corporation—writes syphilis on her death certificate. This lie, like all cheap lies, does not merely misname the dead; it instructs the living to doubt them.

Radium has an affinity for bone—the mineral lattice that gives us posture and poise reads the element as kin and tucks it away. Silently enclosed, it honeycombs the bone. The alpha particles—patient, particulate insults—whittle away from within. Marrow withers; blood falters; bones thin and then splinter. In some unlucky bodies, proliferations of malignant bone—sarcomas—rise up like alien fruit. The tumors can be grotesque in a way that begs for analogy and resists it. One woman’s pelvis blossoms into a mass “larger than two footballs,” a sentence that asks you to imagine the shorelines of her pain, and then know you cannot.

Grace Fryer, one of the first to push the matter into court, does something very American and very brave: she looks for a lawyer. By then her spine is collapsing on itself, a folding chair where a column should be. She wears a steel brace that is meant to do for her what the bone can no longer manage. She is not alone. Katherine Schaub, Albina and Quinta Larice, and Edna Hussman join her. The newspapers call them the Five Women Doomed to Die. Accurate, and a headline writer’s sin. The women walk or are carried into court on crutches and in wheelchairs, with bandages that cannot possibly do all the work demanded of them. Their testimony is a living exhibit. Every step is a deposition.

The corporation does what corporations often do when cornered by the logic of the body: it delays. Hearings are rescheduled, motions multiplied, disclosures withheld, all the small paperwork bets that time will do for you what science cannot. Each delay suggests a strategy that can scarcely be said aloud: if the plaintiffs die, the case might die too. The women sit through testimony from doctors who swear by radium’s safety and from executives whose calm is a kind of weather. They answer questions about whether they kept their brushes clean, whether they licked more than they were told to, whether they were tidy. The questions are nominally about procedure, but actually about blame.

In 1928—after public pressure and the accumulation of bodily evidence—a settlement arrives. Each woman will receive $10,000, a further $600 per year for the rest of her life, and medical treatment. To families whose budgets have been explained by subtraction for years, the sums look princely. To women dying fast, they are abstract. Some of the money pays for funerals. The company admits no liability. The law, in its careful language, grants compensation without confession. As if money could be placed in the space where an apology would go, and do enough.

The fight, like radium’s own slow light, travels west to Illinois, to Ottawa, where the Radium Dial Company has trained a new cohort of shining girls. The illnesses repeat themselves with the eerie insistence of a chorus. 

Among these women is Catherine Donohue. Her body fails with unnerving symmetry to the bodies that failed before, and yet she is singular. The grapefruit-sized tumor at her hip; the teeth gone; the jaw disintegrating into constant tenderness and pus; the gauze pressed almost permanently to her face. 

By 1938 she is too ill to make the trip to the hearing, so the hearing comes to her. A commissioner sits in a chair that creaks when he shifts. Her husband, Thomas, not a man given to performance, folds his hands and keeps them folded. Catherine swears to tell the truth, and then does, beautifully and without ornament: It is too late for me, but not for you.

The sentence is a curse and a benediction. Catherine dies before the last papers are signed, the machinery of appeal still grinding somewhere far from the little house where she made her testimony.

We can say, accurately, that the lawsuits reshaped the landscape. They helped establish workers’ compensation for diseases contracted on the job; they spurred regulations and put an ethical fence around certain industrial practices. They seeded a discipline whose practitioners now measure particulates and solvent vapors, and try to imagine every way a routine can harm you. We can point to the thresholds and exposure limits and the way factories have been built since to move air and light through rooms. We can admire the scaffold of rules and precautions that grew from a single simple lie: that the powder was harmless.

But to read only the legal outcomes is to miss the cost. The Radium Girls had to be spectacularly damaged in order to be believed. Their bodies had to make the case that argument alone could not. Doctors misdiagnosed them, sometimes with brutality masquerading as prudence. Employers dismissed them as careless. Engineers waved away their complaints as anecdote. Neighbors whispered that something else, something shameful, must be at the root of so much decay. 

Only when jaws fell silent and hips shattered and the women bled out in their twenties did the world agree to look at the paint rather than the women. It is not a coincidence that belief arrived with the stench of rot. The lesson seems to recur: when harms are invisible, the harmed must become conspicuous.

What lingers for me—years after first reading the cases, and longer still after seeing the photograph—are the ordinary details that stubbornly refuse to become myth. Grace’s steel corset, heavy and practical; Katherine’s scrapbook of clippings, the way teenagers catalog their lives with paste and scissors, the way grief drafts us into keeping a kind of ledger; Albina’s small, deft hands; Quinta following her sister not only into a factory but into a lawsuit that she knows she will not outlive; Edna, who surfaces in fewer stories, as if to prove that even among the famous dead there are shadows. And Catherine, regal from her bed.

I try to imagine the factories as they would have felt from the inside, without borrowing too much from hindsight. The radios humming tinny marches; the chatter about shoes and landlords and brothers in uniform; the small rivalry over whose numbers are neatest; the smell of paint and pencil shavings and metal. 

I try to imagine the moment the first tooth does not heal. I try to imagine the first night a girl wakes to blood on the pillow where saliva should be. I try to understand the spiritual fatigue of being told again and again that your pain is unremarkable, that if something were truly wrong it would reveal itself in some other, more palatable way.

The horror here is not only medical but narrative. To be believed, the women had to perform their injuries—had to bring their bandages into court, had to sit on chairs that pinched their hip tumors, had to hitch their sentences around the gaps where teeth used to be. They had to hold very still while men took notes. They had to answer questions in voices made thin by anemia. They had to bless the room with the authority of deterioration. And then, when belief finally arrived, it did what belief always does: it asked them to keep proving it.

It is tempting to insist that we would never, now, make such a mistake. We have agencies and acronyms; we have decades of epidemiology; we have monitors and meters; we can count particles per million and per billion; we can model exposures and assign responsibility and document the whole chain in a spreadsheet that can be subpoenaed. 

And yet. I think about the slowness that still dogs environmental and occupational illness; about dairy-farm workers who swallow dust as spray drifts over their lunch breaks, because masking or shutting down would cut into productivity; about heavy-vehicle mechanics breathing diesel exhaust daily, long before the link to cancer is publicly conceded; about primary school teachers who stock their classrooms with paint, glue, and cleaning supplies—only later realising why their heads throb; about vineyard or orchard workers whose skin burns when sprays are applied, and whose lungs tighten in the summer months when the fruit is sweetest. The machinery of disbelief, once built, is very durable. It is greased by profit and protected by politeness. It can survive even inside institutions that mean well. It has learned to speak in human-resources language.

The moral clarity of the Radium Girls’ case is a gift and a trap. It lets us say, with a clean conscience, that they were wronged, and it tempts us to imagine that harm must always look like that—dramatic, disfiguring, undeniable. But most harms are slower, are a little boring, are dark rather than luminous. They take years to gather force; they scatter symptoms across body systems; they let doubt thrive. The Radium Girls are not only martyrs of a bygone industrial era; they are a parable about the price of certainty and the ambition of denial.

What, then, do we owe them beyond remembrance? Perhaps the most ordinary sort of vigilance. The willingness to believe someone before the x-rays become grotesque. The seriousness to take a complaint as data rather than as mood. The humility to accept that a process we have normalized may be quietly eating someone. The discipline to ask who is glowing for us—who carries home on their blouse the invisible residue of the conveniences we enjoy—and whether their paychecks include, in the small print, a bill for their bones.

It is not fashionable to speak of heroism in this register. The word has been worn to threads by overuse and by the kind of advertising that calls everything heroic so that nothing is. But I can think of no better word for women who turned their bodies into arguments they never should have had to make. Heroism here is not a charge into cannon fire; it is staying alive as long as you can so you can sit up in your own living room and tell the truth into a stenographer’s notebook. It is answering questions whose premise you know to be obscene. It is saying your one sentence and trusting that the rest of us will carry it.

There is an urge, in writing about suffering, to tidy it into catharsis: to end with a neat moral, or a reform that arrived just in time. I cannot offer that. The reforms mattered. The case law matters immensely. The rules built from their pain continue to save people whose names we do not know. But pain is not paid off by the rulebook. The ledger does not balance when you look up OSHA standards. The fact remains that the world learned to believe these women precisely because it could no longer look away from their bodies. That is not a debt the future can settle by conducting air-exchange calculations. It is a debt we honor by believing faster, and by designing work as if the invisible were not merely possible, but probable.

It is also a debt of attention. There are other photographs that might have replaced the one that will not leave me: a studio with its long windows, a line of girls bent like prayer; a dentist with his mask slightly askew, eyes sharpened by what he’s just seen; Grace standing very straight inside a contraption of steel; a factory’s doorway from which every man once responsible for the safety of the women has already gone home. But I keep returning to Catherine’s living room because the law went there, for once, and because the camera did too. 

The girls laughed under factory lights. They painted stars on their fingernails and a dot on a tooth. They joked about making themselves into lanterns. They walked home glowing. They brought home wages, and hope, and a dust you could not stop at the door. They walked into dentists’ offices and out of them different. They learned the names of bones by feel. They learned the stamina of pus. They learned that the body’s decay keeps time on its own dial. They learned the cruel curriculum by which a complaint becomes a theory, a theory becomes a case, and a case becomes a cautionary tale. 

And so: enter the room. It is small, and the furniture is ordinary, and the air is full of the dignity of people doing something hard. The light is not kind but it is honest. The stenographer’s pencil scratches. A man clears his throat because he does not know what else to do. The woman in the bed, gaunt and unbowed, looks at you as if through you. She does not waste her breath on ornament.

It is too late for me, but not for you. 

We inherit the pronoun ‘you’ as if it were a courtroom exhibit, passed down a line of hands. It is our job to keep it in view.