Dramaturgical Note
In 1920, any young girl would have been proud to work for the U.S. Radium Corporation. Painting soldiers’ watches and instrument dials with luminous radium paint was patriotic, better-paid than comparable jobs, and permitted the girls to work in sunny workshops rather than the cramped, dusty textile factories where working-class girls from immigrant families typically found employment.
There was also the glamour of working with radium itself. Since its discovery by Marie Curie in 1898, radium had become a marketplace sensation. Doctors claimed it could cure more than 150 ailments, including cancer. Cosmetic companies blended radium into creams and lotions to give skin “a radiant glow,” and toy manufacturers used radium paint to give their dolls glow-in-the-dark eyes.
Despite the absence of studies on radium’s properties, higher-ups at U.S. Radium assured the dialpainters that the paint was perfectly safe, and even taught them to finely point their paintbrushes with their mouths– a technique known as “lippointing.” Confident that the paint couldn’t hurt them, the girls freely used it as nail polish, eyeshadow, and even toothpaste. The radium dust that filled the factory air would settle onto the girls’ clothing, making them glow so brightly on their walk home that neighbors began calling them “ghost girls.”
It was to be an apt moniker. In 1921, twenty-five year old dialpainter Amelia “Mollie” Maggia visited her neighborhood dentist for a tooth extraction that never healed. Within a few months, the surrounding tissue had rotted so severely that her dentist could lift her entire lower jaw out of her mouth. She died a little over a year later in September of 1922 of what we now know to be radium poisoning, caused by the factory’s mandated lippointing technique.
By 1927, more than fifty dialpainters had died. During this time, the New Jersey Departments of Health and Labor launched four inquiries into factory conditions. Not a single one provoked regulation, partially due to U.S. Radium, which privately paid off dentists and doctors and hampered investigations. Publically, the company vehemently denied culpability, blaming the girls’ symptoms on syphilis. In response to a Harvard study proving radium’s toxicity, company president Arthur Roeder wrote: “Your preliminary report is rather a discussion with tentative conclusions based on evidence much of which is necessarily circumstantial… Our conclusion is that there is nothing harmful anywhere in the works.”
Still, Harvard’s “preliminary,” “circumstantial,” “tentative” report was enough for five dialpainters– Grace Fryer, Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub, Quinta McDonald, and Albina Larice– to sue U.S. Radium for compensation in 1928. Due to a morbid but undeniably effective media circus surrounding the case, national sympathy lay with the dialpainters. U.S. Radium grudgingly settled out of court later that year for $10,000 in damages, medical expenses, and a $600 yearly annuity for the remainder of the girls’ lives.
None of the five radium girls lived long after receiving their compensation. Quinta died in 1929, Katherine and Grace in 1933, Edna in 1939, and Albina in 1946.
Still, their fight to hold U.S. Radium accountable had substantial ripple effects in workplace safety. Their case spurred research into radium and safety protocols that researchers involved in the Manhattan Project relied on during their work with radiation. It led to the official banning of radium paint in 1968. And, most notably, it contributed to the formation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970. While the dialpainters may no longer be with us, the ghost girls’ legacy has lingered long after death.
