Luciana Pellegrino

Mollie Maggia's jaw came away in pieces in her dentist's hands in 1922, and when she died that September, aged 24, her death certificate said syphilis. She had been a dial painter at the United States Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, one of hundreds of young women, most in their teens and early twenties, painting glowing numbers onto watch faces with a paint called Undark. To keep a fine point on the camel-hair brush they were taught to shape it between their lips. Lip, dip, paint, hundreds of dials a day. The supervisors told them radium was harmless, good for them even. The girls painted their nails and teeth with it for fun and walked home glowing in the dark. Then their teeth began falling out. Jaws rotted and snapped. Spines crumbled. Doctors had no name for it, and the company did not offer one. It had one. In 1924, under pressure, it paid Harvard specialists to study the factory, and they reported that radium was the cause. The company sat on the report and let it be known that its workers were in good health. Its own examiner told sick women they were well. When the deaths kept coming, the whispering started that dial painters were loose girls, and that it was syphilis. Grace Fryer began losing her teeth in 1922 and spent two years looking for a lawyer brave enough to take on the company. In 1927 she sued, with four other women, and the papers named them the Radium Girls. That autumn Mollie was dug up to settle the syphilis question. Her bones were radioactive. The company stalled, knowing its accusers were dying, and by the first hearing in January 1928 two of the five could not raise their arms to take the oath. They settled that June for $10,000 each and $600 a year. The judge who brokered the deal turned out to own shares in the company. The man who had invented the paint died of radium poisoning that November. In Illinois, at the Radium Dial Company, Catherine Donohue gave her evidence in 1938 from her sickbed, weighing about five stone, and was dead within months. Her case helped win American workers the right to sue over the diseases their jobs gave them. The women were told they were young and healthy and had nothing to fear, and when they started dying, the company found it easier to attack their virtue than admit what was in its paint. Their graves in New Jersey still set off a Geiger counter.