We obviously now know to stay away from radioactive materials – people know not to eat too many bananas because eating many millions of bananas can give you radiation poisoning. But radium, discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie, was a health fad in the 1920’s. Like how kombucha is popular now, there were “health waters” with radium. Some experiments led people to believe that there were medicinal properties to radium, so it also became used to treat anything and everything, from cancer to blindness to acne.
Radium was advertised heavily, but the real thing was expensive. But young girls from poorer immigrant families could access radium if they worked painting watch faces. These watches were made mostly for soldiers during WWI (1914-1918) and WWII (1939-1945); the glowing numbers were useful when out in (dark) combat. There are so many cute, now haunting, stories of these girls literally glowing as they went out for the night. Unfortunately, the high exposure to radium led to many women developing horrible cancers. While the ties between health deterioration and radium exposure were clear (there were unique symptoms with high incidence rates among former workers), their employees were able to conceal harmful information to continue production. After many deaths and decades of determined women fighting for compensation to pay their medical bills, regulations protecting workers were finally put in place. Regulations included a baseline standard for workplace safety.
(Thanks to @ngfriedman138 for letting me paint her as an unhappy girl from the roaring 20’s… I tried painting her jawbone in glow-in-the-dark paint, but the paint was too thin and it didn’t work – I now know that I should have painted the bones with regular paint and added some highlights with glow-in-the-dark paint instead.)
Summarized form:
Moore, K. (2017). The radium girls: The dark story of America’s shining women. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks.
Originally posted on Instagram March 27, 2020
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