The Radium Girls

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moon

Lip...dip...paint...

Following the Curies' discovery of radium in 1898,  radium was everywhere in the early 1900s. Radium's harmful effects were hidden from the public and radium powder was put in tonic water, body lotion, everything.

Radium's glowing property made it essential to the war effort. Women were hired to paint watch dials with radium powder that would glow in the dark. The United States' entry into WWI in 1917 skyrocketed the need for women dial painters.

The Radium Girls tells the story of dial painters in New Jersey at the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, later the United States Radium Corporation, and in Ottawa, Illinois at the Radium Dial Company.

So harmless was radium powder declared to be that the dial painters fairly bathed in it. They sometimes used extra powder like makeup, and the powder inevitably settled into their clothes and hair. "When I went home and washed my hands in a dark bathroom, they would appear luminous and ghostly. My clothes, hanging in a dark closet, gave off a phosphorescent glare. When I walked along the street, I was aglow from the radium powder" (44). The dial painters were laughingly called "ghost girls".

Unfortunately, the harmful radium powder entered their bodies. The technique of lip...dip...paint meant that the girls ingested small quantities of radium each day. The radium powder settled in their bodies and remained their for years, haunting them.


As we know today, and indeed scientists knew it then, exposure to radium is harmful. The "ghost girls" became the walking dead. Many dial painters became ill and died from their work...losing teeth, jawbones, developing cancers or sarcomas...

Many of the women believed that their employers were responsible for their ill-health. Together they filed several lawsuits. The mistreatment of the dial workers ultimately led to the creation of OSHA.

"United they triumphed. Through their friendship, through their refusal to give up and through their sheer spirit, the radium girls left us all an extraordinary legacy. They did not die in vain. They made every second count" (396).

Newspaper coverage of Catherine Donahue's trial

Memorial Statue in Ottawa, Illinois