The Radium Girls sued their employer, the United States Radium Corporation, in the 1920s for exposing them to harmful radiation while painting clock faces with radium-based paint. The women won their case, highlighting the dangers of working conditions and leading to better protection for workers from radiation.
The Radium Girls were a group of women who filed suit against their employer, the United States Radium Corporation, in the 1920s. The women blamed dangerous working conditions at the Corporation’s New Jersey factory had exposed them to harmful radiation, leading to illness. The girls eventually won their case, setting the stage for future individual lawsuits over working conditions and capturing the attention of the American public.
Members of this group worked at the factory between 1917 and the mid-1920s. They were used to paint clock faces with a radium-based luminous paint. Significantly, the company knew radium was harmful and took steps to protect the chemists and researchers who formulated and composed the paint. The women, however, worked without any protection and were assured that radium was perfectly safe.
Many of the Radium Girls painted their nails, teeth and bodies with radium for fun, surprising friends and family when the paint glowed in the dark. They also habitually licked the brushes they used to shape them, thereby ingesting large amounts of radium.
In 1923, a bank teller named Grace Fryer began experiencing significant pain in her jaw and went to the dentist for treatment. The dentist discovered that her jaw had been severely damaged, resembling more like a sponge than bone, and after he discovered that Grace worked for the United States Radium Corporation, she began linking her condition to others. cases that she had seen.
The Radium Girls have experienced jaw necrosis, tooth loss, anemia, and a variety of other radiation-related health issues. Some of them were so radioactive that their jaws could leave traces on dental film even without X-rays. In classified tests performed by the United States Radium Corporation, many of the Radium Girls showed high levels of radiation in their bodies, but this fact is been hidden from them.
Fryer ended up suing, and five other women joined the lawsuit. They became known as the Radium Girls and their case became a topic of immense public concern. The defense attempted to tarnish the Radium Girls’ reputation by suggesting they had syphilis and companies working with radium-pressured medical professions to suppress medical records suggesting radium exposure was harmful. Eventually the women succeeded and their struggle was used to lay the groundwork for better protection of workers from radiation. Many former dial painters from United States Radium and other companies have also participated in long-term studies designed to provide more insight into the effects of radium exposure.
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