Radium Girls: The Women Who Fought for Their Lives in a Killer Workplace
Radium Girls: The Women Who Fought for Their Lives in a Killer Workplace Radium Girls Hundreds of young girls and women who worked in American watch factories during the 1920s were exposed to so much radium that they came home glowing in the dark. The prolonged exposure to radium — used in the luminous paint that coated the watch faces — caused their vertebrae to collapse, their jaws to swell up and fall off, and their lives to slowly end in agony while battling cancer At the onset of World War I, several factories were established across the United States to produce watches and military dials painted with a material containing radium, a radioactive element that glows in the dark. Hundreds of young women were hired for the well-paying painting jobs because their small hands were well suited for the exacting, detailed work. Radium had been discovered just 20 years earlier by French physicists Marie Curie and Pierre Curie, and its properties were not well known. Because it had been used ...