The Radium Girls: The Women Who Glowed and Then Died

The radium girls were young factory workers — mostly immigrants in their teens and twenties — who painted luminescent watch dials for U.S. Radium Corporation in the 1910s and 1920s. Their supervisors taught them to lip-point their brushes with radium paint and told them the substance was safe. The company’s own scientists wore lead aprons and handled radium with tongs. By the time the first lawsuits reached a courtroom in 1927, the women’s jaws were disintegrating, their bones fracturing, their blood counts collapsing — and autopsies were being conducted on their bodies without consent.^1^

A War Industry Built on Young Women’s Labor

The commercial radium industry grew out of World War I demand for luminescent instrument dials that soldiers could read in dark trenches. U.S. Radium Corporation, founded in 1917 in Orange, New Jersey, was among the world’s largest producers of radium paint, employing at peak roughly 70 young women to hand-paint watch faces.

The dial painters were typically in their teens and early twenties, drawn from working-class Catholic immigrant families in Essex County. The work paid between $20 and $30 a week in the early 1920s — well above average factory wages for women at the time. The paint they used, called “Undark,” contained radium dissolved in zinc sulfide and emitted a faint green glow.^1^

The lip-pointing technique was not accidental. Factory supervisors instructed the women in it directly. When some expressed concern about putting paint in their mouths, company representatives assured them radium was harmless. This was false. The company’s scientists — who wore lead-lined aprons and handled radium with tongs — knew by the early 1920s that radium was highly dangerous. The workers were told nothing.

The Dying Followed a Pattern the Company Recognized

The health effects began appearing in the early 1920s. Amelia Maggia, who had worked at the Orange factory from 1917 to 1920, went to her dentist in 1921 with severe jaw pain. He removed a tooth and her jaw disintegrated. When surgeon Joseph Egan removed a piece of her jawbone, it fell apart in his hands. Amelia Maggia died in September 1922 at age 24. Her death was initially attributed by the company’s consulting physician to syphilis — a diagnosis that served to stigmatize the victim and deflect attention from the factory.^2^

The pattern continued. Mollie Maggia — Amelia’s sister — died in 1923. Irene Rudolph died in 1923. By 1924, the factory had enough deaths among young former employees that Frederick Flynn, a company-paid physician at Columbia University, was brought in to examine survivors. He declared them healthy. They were not.

Dr. Harrison Martland, the Essex County medical examiner, became suspicious and investigated beginning in 1924. By 1925, Martland had developed a test — pressing a Geiger counter against the workers’ bodies — that demonstrated the women were radioactive, their bones saturated with radium still irradiating them from the inside. He tested the exhumed body of Amelia Maggia: her remains glowed in the dark.^3^

What Does Corporate Knowledge Actually Look Like?

The documents that came out of litigation answered this precisely: the company knew, discussed the risk internally, and chose concealment over disclosure. This is the same pattern that ran through the asbestos cover-up and the tobacco industry’s decades of denial.

Five Women Who Took the Company to Court

Grace Fryer, Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub, Quinta McDonald, and Albina Larice filed suit against U.S. Radium Corporation in 1927. By that point their conditions were severe: some could not raise their arms above their shoulders, some had fractured hips, some had tumors growing in their jaws, and one had been confined to bed for two years.

The company delayed. Its lawyers argued the statute of limitations had expired, demanded physical examinations by company-selected physicians, and postponed hearings. The five plaintiffs — whose lawyers called them the “Radium Girls” — became a national story. Newspaper coverage was extensive and generally sympathetic, partly because the contrast between the company’s wealth and the women’s deteriorating bodies was impossible to ignore.^4^

The case never went to verdict. In June 1928, Judge William Clark strongly suggested settlement, and the company agreed: each woman received $10,000 immediately (roughly $175,000 in 2024 dollars), a $600 annual pension, and payment of all future medical expenses. The company admitted no wrongdoing.

Grace Fryer died in 1933. Katherine Schaub died in 1933. Quinta McDonald died in 1929. Edna Hussman died in 1939. Albina Larice died in 1946. None lived to middle age.

The Legal Precedent Outlasted the Women Who Created It

The case established for the first time that employers could be held liable for occupational diseases with long latency periods — a precedent that reshaped industrial safety law. It contributed to early federal occupational health standards and informed the eventual establishment of OSHA.

The Ottawa, Illinois, facility — operated by the Radium Dial Company, a separate corporation — continued through the early 1930s and its workers suffered similar fates. Catherine Wolfe Donohue, an Ottawa dial painter who died in 1938, was so radioactive that her bones continued registering on Geiger counters for years after her death. She won her own lawsuit against Radium Dial just months before she died, sitting in a wheelchair in the courtroom too weak to lift her head.^5^

The Radium Girls glowed because the paint saturating their bones was still luminescent. The companies that sent them to their deaths understood exactly what they were doing. The documents proving that understanding existed in corporate files before the first woman’s jaw began to disintegrate. This case belongs in the same record as Love Canal and Bhopal — industries that treated human bodies as acceptable collateral for profit.

Part of Corporate Atrocities — ← Back to series hub

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Sources:

1. Moore, Kate. The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women. Sourcebooks, 2017.
2. Martland, Harrison S. “Occupational Poisoning in Manufacture of Luminous Watch Dials.” Journal of the American Medical Association 92, no. 6 (1929).
3. Clark, Claudia. Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910–1935. University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
4. Mullner, Ross. Deadly Glow: The Radium Dial Worker Tragedy. American Public Health Association, 1999.
5. Ross, Walter. Crusade: The Official History of the American Cancer Society. Arbor House, 1987.