The Radium Girls: The Women Who Glowed in the Dark

SPEAKER_00 0:00 Today, we know that if something is radioactive, it might not be good for your health. We certainly know we should probably avoid eating the stuff. But by the early 1900s, radium had not long been discovered, an exciting new element that glowed in the dark and was hailed as a wonder substance with extraordinary health benefits. And few were more excited than the well-paid young women employed to paint glow-in-the-dark watch dials.

SPEAKER_01 0:26 They were nicknamed the ghost girls. They would literally be shining like ghosts as they walked through the streets.

SPEAKER_00 0:33 But the consequences of working with radium would turn out to be far more horrific than anyone could have imagined.

SPEAKER_01 0:40 They could literally reach into their mouths and pick out pieces of their jawbones.

SPEAKER_00 0:44 I'm Ollie, and this is What We Did Before, where we explore the history of everyday life. Today I'm speaking to Kate Moore, the New York Times best-selling author of The Radium Girls. The story of an incredible group of women whose fight for justice still influences how we deal with radioactive substances to this day. So, Kate, it is an absolute pleasure to have you on what we did before. Thank you so much for joining me. My pleasure. Thank you very much for asking me. So I think the best place to start, really, is to find out exactly who the radium girls are.

SPEAKER_01 1:17 Well, for me personally, the personal answer is they're the most inspirational and amazing women I've ever encountered. And the short, factual answer is they were the American women from the First World War and Roaring 20s who used to paint clocks and watches with glow-in-the-dark radium paint. And they would lip point their paintbrushes between their lips to make a fine point. And in so doing, they swallowed the radium. And what follows is a landmark legal fight as they fight to hold their employers responsible for the health of their employees. It was a groundbreaking legal case. And it was also a case that transformed science and humanity's understanding of radiation and the dangers of it.

SPEAKER_00 2:07 I mean, that is quite just setting the stage for quite a phenomenal story, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 2:13 It is a phenomenal story, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 2:18 So telling it must have been really difficult for you. To try to piece it all together and tell it in a way which sort of does it justice must have been really tricky. Was it, did it feel like quite a weight for you to take this on?

SPEAKER_01 2:32 It was, I was very naive, is the honest answer. I had written I'd written books before, but I'd never written a history book before. So even from that starting point, you know, the amount of research that I had to do and the style in which I've written the Radium Girl story is something called narrative nonfiction. So absolutely everything in the book is true. It's fully researched and authenticated from documents made at the time, whether that's a company memo, whether it's a letter or a diary or a court testimony. But the book is written in a way that it reads like a novel. So the real Radium girls, Grace Fryer, Catherine Donahue, hopefully they appear in the book almost as real people and you hear directly from them in their own words about what was happening to them. So the research was extraordinary in terms of the amount of detail that I had to find. And then, as you say, piecing it all together, deciding what to include. But it was truly the most rewarding and astonishing experience of my life. And I am grateful every day that I get to be an advocate for them and tell the world about how special they are. And that's why I'm so excited to talk to you today, because it's a chance to share their story.

SPEAKER_00 3:50 And tell me about this job then, um, painting clock dials with this radium paint, then. This was this was quite skilled, wasn't it? And a well-paid job at the time.

SPEAKER_01 4:00 Absolutely. It was actually known as the elite job for the poor working girls. And there were several reasons for that. Number one, the money. The women were paid by the number of watches that they painted every day, and the most skilled workers were in the top 5% of female wage earners nationally, earning more than three times the average factory floor worker. Um, so yeah, it was a super glamorous job as well, not only because of the high wages, which meant the girls, if they wanted to, could spend them on, you know, fur coats, cloche hats, um, all the latest fashions of the 20s and the 1910s. But it was also, you know, to get to work with radium, you know, Marie Curie, who discovered it, she described it as my beautiful radium because it glowed. And Catherine Donahue, the radium girl I write about in the book, she said she and her friends used to wear their good dresses to the plant because when they went out after work dancing in the music halls, the speakeasies, the radium girls would literally be shining with this glowing dust that they'd get covered with while they were at work. They were actually encouraged to practice painting. So, you know, their dresses might have buttons or buckles that they would paint with the shining radium paint. One woman is on record as having painted her teeth with the radioactive radium paint. Oh my god. Um, to give, you know, a smile that would knock her suitor dead. It was an astonishing job. And part of the appeal as well, I didn't appreciate till I was researching. And I looked up Catherine Dunahue in her local town directory, and it listed her name, address, and occupation. But it didn't say dial painter, which was the sort of technical term for what the radium girls did. It said Catherine Dunahue, artist, radium dial company. And these women were artists. It was incredibly delicate work. You know, the pocket watches that they were painting, you know, absolutely tiny in terms of the numerals that they had to paint. And that is why the partly why they ended up lip pointing. It was how they were instructed to do it. But it was necessary because when you're painting only a millimeter, you know, in width, you need to make sure the point on your brush is super sharp. And that's why all the girls would put the brush between their lips and kind of suck on it to make a fine point for this delicate artistic handiwork.

SPEAKER_00 6:34 Yeah, and I mean that to our sort of modern ear does sound completely crazy.

SPEAKER_01 6:40 It's completely jarring. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 6:43 And and we'll we'll get on to the implications of what that meant for the health of these women shortly. But what kind of women were being employed to do this job? Because you said it was high paid, but among the the sort of poorer women. So yeah, what type of person came to it?

SPEAKER_01 6:57 Yeah, so um the companies tended to recruit from immigrant families, as you say, the sort of working class backgrounds, you know. There were dial painting studios all over America. I have chosen to write about two in particular, one in New Jersey and one in this little town called Ottawa in Illinois. But in both places, um, these were the daughters, granddaughters of immigrants. They were often quite young women. Um, records show that actually some of them were as young as 11, but they tended to be teenagers. And some of them had left school and got the job. Others actually did it as a kind of part-time job or a job in the summer holidays where they just sort of go in and paint for a couple of months over the summer holidays, that sort of thing. And yeah, they tended to be, well, there was a range actually. I was about to say they tended to be not that well educated, but actually there was a real mix because it depended when the women started painting. Um, exactly what had been their background was different. And because of the time we're talking about historically, um, the studio in New Jersey opened in 1916. Of course, the following year, America joins the First World War. And that leads to a huge boom in the radium dial painting industry because the women are not just painting watches and clocks with glow-in-the-dark paint, they're also painting instruments that will light up the dashboards of ships and planes and automobiles, absolutely needed for the international war that's happening in Europe. And so, for example, one woman called Grace Fryer, she was 18 when she got a job in the Dow Painting Studio. She actually already had a job that paid the same. So she was, you know, earning good money. And yet she chose to leave that job, go and join the studio because she wanted to do her bit for her country. And there was a patriotic motivation to many of the women for joining the studio too.

SPEAKER_00 8:59 And this was an exciting time for radium, wasn't it? As you mentioned, Marie Curie had not long discovered it. How long was it since the discovery and until they started using it in clock dials like this?

SPEAKER_01 9:10 So it was December 1898 when radium was first discovered. And very quickly, actually, it started being exploited by entrepreneurs. So initially, um, there was a lot of experimentation scientifically and medically, and around the turn of the century, they had already discovered that radium was incredibly powerful and incredibly good at treating cancerous tumours because it would basically destroy the cancerous tumor and leave the person well. So it was a life-saving element, and people then thought, well, if it can save lives, it must be a healthful element. And then other uses sprung up around it, particularly using a small amount of radium, almost a minuscule amount of radium. And so it was used therapeutically, pills and dressings to treat anything from gout to hay fever. People used it in lingerie to boost their sex lives. It was put into chocolate. Um, so you know, you want a sugar boost, you get a bar of chocolate if you ate radium chocolate. The idea was that, you know, it would enliven you in these ever new ways. They discovered that radium 226, this isotope they were using, had a half-life of 1,600 years. And so the entrepreneurs were really interested in that because they thought, well, if radium is sort of at its peak level fitness for all those centuries, can we not harness that and use it to try and extend human life and human fitness? And, you know, people wrote about oh, I can feel the sparkles inside my anatomy. It makes old men young. And, you know. The hype was real. The hype was real. You know, I think, you know, in the 21st century we've had kale. Um at this time, it was radium. And, you know, it's astonishing because we know what we know now, but at the time, people thought it was not only safe, but actually beneficial to health. So, you know, this was another appeal of the job to Grace Fryer and Catherine Dunahue and the other radium girls because they thought they were working with this wonder element that was, you know, sung about on Broadway, written about in newspapers and magazines. And as I say, it was in such sort of commonplace goods. You know, you could get radium cosmetics, face powders and soaps, you could get radium toothpaste, brighter smile with every brushing, uh, was the slogan. And so people just genuinely thought there was absolutely no danger at all.

SPEAKER_00 11:55 Yeah, I mean, it kind of sounds like um we we think we've moved on, but our modern foray into AI is smacks of a similar narrative. This is great. This is perfect. Let's integrate it into everything. There can't be any possible dangers or drawbacks. Oh, hold on a minute.

SPEAKER_01 12:10 Completely. And actually, I've you know, I've been talking about the Radium Girls for several years now, and people always say, you know, what is the thing we're doing now? AI is a great example. I used to say five years ago, oh, social media, you know, perhaps perhaps that's not going to be so good. And now, of course, we're seeing all these court cases, we're seeing bands brought in for young people. You know, we we make the same mistakes. We make the same mistakes.

SPEAKER_00 12:34 How important were these watch dials at the time? Like, was it was it big business?

SPEAKER_01 12:39 It was big business, yeah. Um, millions and millions of dollars. And what they were doing for the government, for the war effort, as I say, you know, glow in the dark radium paint it, there were so many uses for it. And so, yes, there were watches and and clocks and there were instruments and things like that. And then post-warti as well, there were more sort of frivolous uses. So you people used it in cinemas, you know, to light up the seats so you could see where you were going, that sort of thing that people encouraged uh to paint the eyes of toys so that the teddy bears or the doll's eyes would glow in the dark, kind of creepy. Perhaps you might want to paint a little bit of a little radium butter on your slippers so in the middle of the night you could find your slippers. Um, so yes, it was a huge industry, as I say, millions and millions and millions of dollars because you had the sort of armament contracts as well as this very sort of commercial uses as well.

SPEAKER_00 13:37 So when you mentioned that they sort of had this shimmer, this glow, was it quite an apparent glow that the radium gave these girls?

SPEAKER_01 13:44 I think there were two glows that we talk about when it comes to the radium girls. So they had the glow that they got from working in the studio where they would get covered in this glowing dust, or perhaps they would actually use the paint to paint their bodies or parts of their dress and so on. And that was, you know, literally a kind of ethereal glow that they would have. Uh, they were nicknamed the ghost girls because when they walked home through the dark streets of New Jersey and Illinois after work, you know, they would literally be shining like ghosts as they walk through the streets. But there was another glow because radium itself does glow. And some of the family members I spoke to and some of the descriptions of seeing the women exhumed in their coffins, does talk about the glow from the radium in their bones, and that's from eyewitness accounts. I spoke to a nephew of Catherine Dunnehues, and he was describing her sick room for me. She lived in this small house in this little town called Ottawa, and she had a big wooden crucifix on the wall. Her bed was brought downstairs because she couldn't do the stairs anymore, and he said it the shades were always drawn because she liked it dark. But her nephew said there was always a light in the room from Catherine herself because the radium that she had once used to make watches and clocks glow in the dark was in her bones and her bones were glowing. And he said you could see every bone in her body glowing from the radium.

SPEAKER_00 16:22 Did people you said like people really did believe it was this sort of wonder substance? Was there any sense at the time that radium could be dangerous or like radiation generally? You know, how much did people know?

SPEAKER_01 16:34 Yeah, I I mean it's almost the sort of million-dollar question with this story. How much did people know? You know, seriously, how how could they be doing this? And it and it is a question that is so valid to ask because they did know it was dangerous. You know, Madame Curie obviously eventually dies from radiation poisoning herself because of all the work that she's been doing. Pierre Curie, her husband, who was working with her on it, he said in 1903, which is, you know, 15 years before radium dial painting has really taken off, he said he would not care to leave himself alone in a room with a kilo of pure radium because it would burn all the skin off his body, destroy his eyesight, and probably kill him. So they knew they were dangers. And the fact even the radium companies knew there were dangers can be seen in the fact that the lab workers working with large amounts of radium are issued with safety equipment. They have ivory-tipped tongs, they've got lead aprons, they have to take enforced vacations if they're overexposed to the radium. So you have this almost inexplicable position where people handling large amounts are warned of the dangers. There is an appreciation of the fact that this is a very dangerous substance. You know, even the people who were running the radium companies had lost a thumb to the radiation poisoning, that the radium had eaten away the thumb, you know, that kind of thing. So there was, they physically had damaged themselves from what they were handling. But the belief was that a tiny amount of radium, such as the radium girls were using in this glow-in-the-dark paint, was safe, was beneficial to health, was not going to hurt you.

SPEAKER_00 18:25 But if he was saying that he wouldn't want to be in a room of a kilo of radium, how much radium was present in the room in which these girls would have been doing their painting?

SPEAKER_01 18:35 Absolutely tiny, or you know, infinitesimal. It it was absolutely it was absolutely, absolutely tiny. And one of the groundbreaking things about their story is the discovery that actually even a small amount of radioactive material is incredibly dangerous.

SPEAKER_00 18:52 Well, the health uh effects were huge. And that does, before we explain what exactly happened, um it does beg the question was was the money so good because the dangers were already quite apparent. Yeah. And it was yeah, money given to these people so that they wouldn't question it almost.

SPEAKER_01 19:12 Yeah, and I I think that's an absolutely a valid question. And I um my answer would be, well, that may have been the case, but if it was the case, nobody told the girls. You know, Mae Cubberly, who was one of the trainers in the studio, she said when they were told to lip point, and they were told to lip point, that was how all the girls did it, it's how they were instructed, it's how the company wanted it done because it was the most efficient way to get the work out. She said the first thing we asked when they were told to put the brushes in their lips was, Does this stuff hurt you? And they were told that it was safe and they did not need to be afraid. So if it was danger money, it certainly wasn't communicated to the women. And when they do start to raise questions, they are always reassured. You know, the the head office comes over to give talks to them, this sort of thing, to tell them that there's no danger, that it's just scaremongering, that it's, you know, it's there is no danger.

SPEAKER_00 20:12 And this is um the lip dip paint method um that you describe, isn't it? And you know, this essentially means that they were eating radium, right? They were constantly throughout the day just eating.

SPEAKER_01 20:26 Constantly swallow swallowing it down. Yeah, yeah. With every number that they painted on every dial that they did, they were swallowing the radioactive radium.

SPEAKER_00 20:35 So, what actually happened over time then, once they started swallowing the radium?

SPEAKER_01 20:39 Well, that over time is a really important part of this story because radium poisoning, it turns out, is incredibly insidious. So it takes years to show itself. You know, most women didn't get any symptoms at all, probably for at least five years. And some women actually went decades before they started feeling any ill effects. And when the symptoms did begin to show, they seemed incredibly innocuous and innocent. It would just be an aching tooth, a sore back, you know, perhaps a little bit of a hip that ached. Um, nothing that was too alarming to begin with. And Catherine Schab, who is the dial painter, sort of opens the book for me, she's a 14-year-old girl in 1917, going to work her first day on the job. In Catherine Scharb's case, she starts with an aching tooth. And so she, as you would do, just goes to the dentist to have the tooth pulled. But what the women found then happened was that the next tooth would start to hurt, and then the next tooth, the next, until Catherine didn't have to go to the dentist anymore to have the teeth pulled because they simply fell out on their own. And essentially what was happening inside the women was that they were slowly being destroyed, their very bodies and bones were being destroyed by the radium from the inside out. Because when you swallow radium, it's actually biomedically similar in terms of the way the body handles it to calcium. And we probably all know that, you know, we're encouraged to drink a glass of milk because the milk, you know, the calcium in the milk will go into our bones and make them strong. And when Catherine and Grace swallowed the radium, their bodies looked at it. I know what to do with this. Put it in their bones, different bones in different women. In Grace Fryer, it was in her spine. Catherine Scharb, as I say, felt it in her jawbone and in her teeth. Catherine Donahue in Illinois first felt it in her foot and then it sort of spread up until it settled in her hip. So you've got women with totally different seeming set of symptoms years after they've been. Dial painters suddenly presenting with these symptoms. And shockingly, when they studied the women and they actually looked at what was happening inside them, their bones had holes in them. They looked moth-eaten in appearance when they studied the bones. And the holes had basically been made by the radium inside the women while the women were still alive. So absolutely excruciating the pain. And Catherine Sharp tried to describe it once, and she said the only thing that she could compare it to was like a dentist drilling on a live nerve minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day. But of course, when the women go to the doctors, the doctors are completely perplexed. These are young women now. We're five years on. So that 14-year-old Catherine Sharp, you know, she's now 19 years old. And they think, well, maybe it's rheumatism or arthritis. They don't connect the cases because it's a foot or it's a back or it's a tooth, and they send the women home with aspirin. And that's what the women are faced with, you know, trying to drag themselves up, trying to figure out what's going on. And it is true to say that it's actually the women themselves who start talking with one another. And actually, one of the tragedies of the story for me is that when that wartime boom happened that I described earlier, the companies needed more and more women in wartime. The ones who were lucky enough to have this job promoted the vacancies to those closest to them, their sisters, their cousins, their friends. And it was wonderful in wartime because you were working with your best mates and the studio operated night and day. And, you know, the women would just have a brilliant time being with their best friends. But of course, as we now go down the line and they're starting to ache and they're starting to get sick, it's the women actually using those friendship networks, you know, becoming that sisterhood, sharing those intimate details of their pain that they realize, as Catherine Shaw put it, there is something going on about this thing.

SPEAKER_00 25:20 And and this, so is it at this time that we start to get this phrase radium jaw? Does it come in at this time or is that later?

SPEAKER_01 25:27 Yeah, that's right. So the early dentists and doctors who are investigating, as I say, initially they're complex. And initially the women are not even necessarily consulting the same people because they've got different problems. But eventually, you know, a dentist will have enough local women coming to him to think, hang on, this, you know, this isn't right. It's such a peculiar condition. It was a condition people hadn't seen before. And you're right, they called it radium jaw because, as well as making the women's teeth fall out, it got into the jawbone. And that moth-eaten appearance I described with the jaw, literally the jawbone riddled with holes, was what the women were experiencing. And the jaws were so brittle and weakened by the radium, which was impossible to get out, by the way. So once it was inside them, it was just there, continually harming them. No way to extract it, no way to undo the damage. It was, it was there and it was stuck. And so the jawbones would literally just break in the women's mouths. And several of them talked about how they could literally, and it's graphic and gory and horrible, but this is the lived experience of the radium girls. They could literally reach into their mouths and pick out pieces of their jawbones because they had literally fractured inside their mouths. And that's where the term and the diagnosis, radium jaw, came to be. That was one of the very early dentists, Dr. Blum, who identified it and published it in a very specialist magazine that the wider world didn't take much notice of at the time.

SPEAKER_00 27:06 God, it really sounds absolutely horrific to have lived with that. The challenge of just daily life to go through that pain, to have such an important part of your body so disfigured.

SPEAKER_01 27:19 Yeah, they they can't they can't eat, as you say. It's your it's your face. So it people is, you know, there's no way to hide it. And the women are absolutely desperate. You know, Grace Fryer is going for operation after operation on her jaws, and they don't realise at first that actually when you try and treat radium jaw, the more you extract or take out, it actually speeds up the disintegration and the destruction. The best thing in some ways is to leave it, but they don't discover that until later. And yeah, and what's so extraordinary about the women for me is that, as my publisher would put it, they they don't just go out with a whimper, they choose to go out with a bang.

SPEAKER_00 27:58 Yeah. And I I love this side of the story because it just shows this incredible determination from the women. Um how many of them were employed in this industry? Was it a big proportion of local women who would have been here?

SPEAKER_01 28:13 Yeah, they I mean they've never actually put a final figure on it, but certainly in in wartime, for example, there were almost 400 women working in that single studio in New Jersey. Um, so we're talking thousands of women across America because there were different dial painting centres in different cities, but they've never actually been able to put a figure on it. And as I mentioned, you know, some women had a full career. They were there for, you know, a decade or more painting dolls in the studio. Other people just did it in their summer holidays for a bit of extra pocket money. Um, so the numbers are hard to put an exact figure on.

SPEAKER_00 28:50 Yeah, and I recently covered the white lead industry, uh Victorian white lead industry, and and how damaging that was to the people who worked there as well, largely women. And many of them continued working there despite the ill health effects because that, you know, that was the job they had, it's what they knew. It was guaranteed money. Was it the same with the Radium Girls?

SPEAKER_01 29:11 Yeah to a degree. I think many of them worked there until they couldn't work anymore if they got too sick to continue. But it wasn't universally the case because once the wartime boom dropped off, sometimes there just weren't the job. So the women moved on to other careers. You know, Grace Fryer got a job in a bank, rose to become the head of her department, you know, super smart woman. So it varied. So some of them kept on, and it, you know, in one case, um, a woman called Sarah, she had an awful limp uh induced by the radium because as the radium affected her legs, many women found that their legs began to shorten, so they'd be left with these sort of exaggerated limps because the bones were being destroyed, so the legs shortened and would sometimes spontaneously fracture. So she was getting a lift to work, like her boss was actually driving her to work because she was so sick. But this was very early on, and at that point they were still investigating, or, you know, initially no connection was made by the authorities. And it's a striking fact in the case of the Radium Girls that even though dozens of young women had died by this point, sort of in the mid-1920s, it wasn't until the first male employee of the Radium firm died that there was an autopsy of him. And then the medical authorities started looking into, you know, why is there so much death in this studio? Why are so many women sick? And it took till then for an expert actually to get involved. And then, you know, that it did snowball. There was this extraordinary doctor called Harrison Martland in New Jersey, and he was the one who did investigate, who published that there was a connection between the women's work and their illnesses, that this was an occupational disease, an occupational poisoning. But it took a long time to get there.

SPEAKER_00 31:05 And so at that time, um it was the case that eventually it would just kill you, this the radium, then.

SPEAKER_01 31:13 Yes. And and sometimes it would be fast and sometimes it would be slow. And as with all the expert serial killers, eventually radium kind of evolves its modus operandi, and later women start to get something called sarcomas, which is essentially bone tumours, and they would be these in enormous cancerous bone tumours that could grow anywhere on the body again, depending on where the radium had settled. And these were sort of latent sarcomas. So, as I say, sometimes it would be decades before a sarcoma would begin to grow. And it was horrifying because some women died from this radium jaw that I've described earlier, and they went sort of quite early. They were the women dying in the early 1920s. But you actually see throughout the 20th century headlines popping up saying, you know, radium dormant killer at work again, and it's a woman in the 1950s who was succumbed to poisoning from a job that she did in her teens.

SPEAKER_00 32:16 In the early days, was it quite easy for the companies to sort of shirk the blame because you know these symptoms weren't appearing for so many years. They could easily sort of detach it from the work they were doing. Oh no, it can't, it can't be what they're doing here in our company. It's five years since they started.

SPEAKER_01 32:32 Absolutely, and they're doing a different job now. And you know, often there would be a well, she was quite sickly when even when she worked for us, you know, she's just trying to palm off something on the firm would be the response. What is shocking in the case of the Radium Girls, but I don't think it's the only example from history at all, is that when the company finally suffers in a way because the rumours sort of get out of hand, as I say, you know, the the sisterhood is talking about what's going on, and that makes the current dial painters worried about what it may mean for them. And so there's a downturn in business. Finally, the company starts investigating and they hire these brilliant scientists from Harvard to investigate. But when the scientists from Harvard say to the company directly, we think it's the radium, the company cover up the report, they hire other specialists who might say other things, and that's what they choose to publish, and they cover up the report that actually connects it fairly early on to say, actually, it is the radium, your firm is at fault. Um, they act completely egregiously in not accepting that and instead doing everything in their power to silence the women, to try to drag out proceedings so the women may die before they get justice, to hire private detectives to dig up dirt on the women. And, you know, because of all this activity from the company, the women are left in the dark. They don't have access to these specialist reports. Uh, they're accused by their community of trying to act against, you know, a local employer. You know, that becomes particularly hard as time moves on. And in Ottawa, Illinois, in particular, the women there are trying to file suit in the midst of the Great Depression. Well, obviously, anyone who has a job, you know, wants that company to stick around. And the women faced a lot of backlash within their communities for actually embarking on what became this groundbreaking fight for justice, trying to hold the employers responsible for the health of their employees. And, you know, what I think is extraordinary on many levels about the women's fight for justice, you know, not only are they doing it when they're so sick, not only are they doing it when the community is against them, but they're also doing it when there is no hope for them personally. And one of my favourite quotes from The Radium Girls comes from Grace Fryer. When she's asked why she's filing suit, you know, putting herself through this extraordinary legal battle, which takes so much energy, she says, it is not for myself that I care. I'm thinking more of the hundreds of other girls to whom this may serve as an example. And I think the altruism of the Radium Girls is truly spectacular because they did this for others to set an example of standing up for your rights, but also to protect other people. And eventually that is ultimately what they achieved because it's thanks to the Radium Girls that we know that a small amount of radium is dangerous. We know that ingesting radioactive substance is dangerous. And thanks to them, people working in nuclear industries today are protected, and a lot of the safety standards for work with nuclear materials, for example, are based directly on the bodies of the radium girls.

SPEAKER_00 36:00 Yeah, so tell me about this incredible story of how they went about it then. Grace Fryer being one of the key figures, as you mentioned. Um we've also got, you've mentioned Catherine Wolfe Donahue. Yeah. Um, what was it that they they did? Uh how did they raise their concerns? How did they start fighting this battle?

SPEAKER_01 36:16 Well, I mean, what's hard in a way is that these are two separate centres. So Grace Fryer's in New Jersey, Catherine Wolfe Donahue is in Illinois, and they're actually a couple of years apart as well. And the cases sort of inform and inspire each other, but the the women never met, that you know, they're they're sort of separate women, even though they went on such a similar journey. And Grace was particularly special because there was a statute of limitations in New Jersey of two years. Now, I mentioned that it maybe took about five years before any symptoms, even the most innocent ones, had started showing in the women. So a statute of limitation of two years, which basically means you have two years from the point of injury to file suit. Otherwise, even if you had a case, your case is null and void. Every lawyer she went to said, no, we can't help you. And, you know, she's wanting to take on a very powerful, well-connected firm. You know, this is a firm who supplies dials to the US Army. Uh, they've got millions of dollars in the bank. And so every lawyer says no. And a lot of the women give up, to be honest. Um, you can imagine, you know, your mental health, let alone your physical health, to see your friends die before you, to know what is ahead of you down the track, to know that there is no cure, that's a really hard thing to cope with. So a lot of women gave up hope. But Grace Fryer didn't, and I think it's telling. Um, I interviewed lots of the women's family members for the book, and her nephew told me that her father was a union delegate for Carpentry Union. And I think growing up in that household, which was very civic-minded, it was political. Grace herself is political. You can see that in some of the quotations she gave to newspapers and things. She would not let it lie. She was determined to fight for justice and hold this employer to account. And so she kept on and kept on and kept on. And eventually she found this really young lawyer, Raymond Berry, not even in his 30s, and he agreed to take the case. And that's where it sort of snowballs from there because it actually becomes international news. Because this is, of course, shocking, this idea that radium, which is in all the cosmetics across the world, you know, we're speaking to each other in the UK, you know, if you went to boots, you could buy radium cosmetics. You know, this is something that is everywhere. And here are these women saying, Well, we have swallowed some of this stuff and it's made us sick. So it was international news across the world and what the women were saying, and the fact that they were embarking on this incredible landmark legal case as well.

SPEAKER_00 39:02 If these products were available across the world, were other were people in other countries not experiencing the ill effects, or was it only because of the prolonged exposure that these radium girls had that the health effects were apparent?

SPEAKER_01 39:14 There were health effects for some people. I think what is really interesting, in a way, about radium poisoning is there are so many variables because how much radium is in that blusher that you're using? Um, how many times you put the blusher on, you know, what is your unique physical makeup to respond to putting that radioactive blusher on? And this is what we see with the radium girls as well, as I say, some of them died really young, really early. Others survived, you know, into old age sometimes, sometimes with having had to have their arms amputated because they got a sarcoma in the arm. But actually, when they amputated the arm, they were able to survive in ill health with damaged teeth, but survive. And it was similar with the um consumers of these products. So, yes, and there was a big case in the 1930s eventually, where someone who had drunk radium water, which was sold as a health tonic recommended dose, five to seven glasses a day. And he had loved the stuff. He had he had consumed hundreds of thousands of bottles of this radioactive water. And the headlines read when this guy, Evan Dyers, died, it said the radium water worked fine until his jaw came off. And so you're right, consumers were affected as well, but it varied as to the level that they were affected, and it took, you know, time before those products were removed from the shelves. I think shockingly, because the New Jersey girls are filing suit in 1928, and it's actually not until the mid-1930s that those products are removed from sale in America.

SPEAKER_00 40:59 And it makes the fight even more powerful, these women who who know ultimately that um they're going to uh suffer ever more increasing ill effects from the radium, that not only are they fighting on behalf of the other women working in those companies, they're sort of fighting on behalf of the rest of the world.

SPEAKER_01 41:19 Yeah. And it and it's actually something that actually becomes even more true as time goes on. And this is sort of skipping ahead a little bit in the story. But as you can imagine, scientists were fascinated by the women as the truth of what had happened to them came to light, because it it was a kind of poisoning that hadn't really been seen before. And the women were eventually sort of deemed essential to the security of the nation because they were an invaluable scientific resource because, you know, they had these tiny, tiny amounts of radiation, you know, radioactive material inside them. And scientists were fascinated to find out what that did. You know, was there a safe level of radiation to which humans could be exposed? Um, what were the potential ill effects? And it's really striking, and it's actually a story that continues right up to today. You know, skipping back in time, you think about the 20th century, you've got the Manhattan Project, you know, dealing with new uh radioactive materials. The lead scientist on that project, Glenn Seaborg, he wrote in his diary that he was haunted by the ghost girls, as he termed them, the radium girls. And the radium girls are the reason why he insisted on safety procedures. They conducted research to find out, you know, are the plutonium and the uranium safe for people? And what they determined is it's similar to radium. So the safety standards that they applied on the Manhattan Project were actually directly derived from the safety standards from the radium industry, derived in turn from the radium girls' bodies. We skip ahead in time. What happens after the Second World War? There's a nuclear arms race. We've all seen those famous pictures of mushroom clouds, you know, above the desert in America. There are tests happening, different countries, different parts of the world. It's raining down radioactive fallout, particularly something called strontium 90, um, was coming from these bomb tests. What do we know about strontium 90? It's new. We know nothing except it's similar to radium. And so they actually studied the radium girls for their full lifespans. Those who were still alive committed to research, they committed to medical tests, to bone marrow biopsies, to regular annual examinations, questionnaires, um, blood tests, x-rays, and they were studied so that the world could learn. And it was partly thanks to them that President Kennedy signed the limited test ban treaty in 1963. So you talk about they're not just protecting other women and other workers, they're protecting the whole world. You know, that could not be more true. And actually, even today, in 2026, the Radium Girls data set is being studied by scientists in America, something called the Million Person Study. And they are looking again at the data, and they're looking partly prosaically, for example, the radiation we receive when we take flights on Earth. You know, how many flights should we take a year? What is a safe level? But they're also looking futuristically. When we send a team of astronauts to Mars, they're going to be exposed to space radiation. What can we learn from the exposure of the radium girls that can inform NASA's decisions about what they do with that astronaut team to keep them safe? And so it's absolutely extraordinary, almost spine tingling, like I've got goosebumps talking to you about it, that this thing that happened a hundred years ago to these extraordinary women, women who Who did act for the good of humanity and who fought the good fight for all of us, these women are still helping us. They are still having an impact. They didn't die in vain.

SPEAKER_00 45:12 Yeah, it it's really powerful. Um and just the fact that they allowed their bodies to be studied in this way, you know, just shows how they were thinking and projecting into the future. You know, they were seeing themselves as these like invaluable resources even when they were suffering.

SPEAKER_01 45:31 They they did absolutely put Pearl Payne, who's a radium girl, I write about, she she said, My case is special and medical men of the future may be interested in it. You know, she could never have known how right she was. And, you know, it's important to say as well, the families supported the research as well. You know, they agreed to exhumations of their relatives so that women who had died in the past would were exhumed and were studied. And so we have thanks to the families as well, because they too have contributed to the world's knowledge about this subject.

SPEAKER_00 46:01 And skipping back a bit in time just to this No, it's fine. Um, this legal battle. Obviously, this young lawyer took on the case. Um, do we know why uh he decided, yeah, why not? It's no one else wants to, but it's it's an interesting one.

SPEAKER_01 46:18 I think he liked the challenge. Um, he had four daughters, and I don't know if seeing young women in peril, having been abused, taken advantage of, um, whether that appealed to him, that he wanted to take on that fight for these women. Um, I think it's interesting he served his clerkship at the radium firm's legal firm. So whether he had a bit of insider knowledge that he thought, I can, you know, he had some leverage there, he had some knowledge there, I don't know. But yeah, he was the one that said, no, I am gonna fight. And he was extraordinary. He did an amazing job. As I say, this guy is not even in his 30s yet, and he is handling this massive case. And it was actually a judge who was working with him who came up with this fantastic interpretation of the Statute of Limitations, which was part of the reason it had taken so long to find a lawyer. And the idea was, well, the radium is inside the women. So it's hurting them anew with every second of the day. So you can't say, well, this happened seven years ago in a radium studio. That was the point of injury, and therefore the two-year statute has expired. The idea is, well, they're being injured anew every second. So the statute of limitations clock should start ticking anew with every second. So yeah, very clever interpretation.

SPEAKER_00 47:43 And were these women having to fight these legal battles from like sort of being bedbound, bed like being s quite severely disabled at this point?

SPEAKER_01 47:51 Yeah, completely. And the Catherine Donahue's case in Illinois is a particularly sad example of how the women literally gave the last vestiges of energy to this legal fight. So Catherine is giving evidence in the late 1930s by the time her case comes to court. She's very, very, very frail. And she actually collapses in court as she hears the evidence from her doctors. And her doctors say if she continues, this could prove immediately fatal to her health. But Catherine insists that the court should continue. Not only that, she wants to give evidence, but she is far too sick now to leave her house. And so the court comes to her, and there are extraordinary pictures of Catherine lying on the sofa in her home, and the judge and the lawyers are gathered around her dining room table taking the evidence. She's surrounded by her fellow radium girls who were also giving evidence in this sort of mocked-up courtroom in her front room. And as I say, it's an example of just how amazing they were, and that was at Catherine's insistence that she wanted to have her day in court and to say her piece so that the case could continue and so that justice could be served.

SPEAKER_00 49:13 Oh, that's that's an incredibly emotional i image to conjure up of them all coming to her house to s sort of see it through. That yeah. That yeah, that's also spine tingling as you were mentioning. Yeah, completely. You came to discover about these women before you actually then dived further into the research for the radium girls, didn't you? Through through the theatre, I think it was.

SPEAKER_01 49:36 That's right, yeah. I directed a play about them. And because I knew the play was based on a true story, I was like, right, I'm gonna do loads of research, so my theatre production is authentic. And it was through reading those books, which were excellent, I was like, oh, hang on a sec. There is no book that is actually about the individual radium girls that tells their story, that puts them centre stage, that listens to their voices, to what they've got to say about what happened to them and that charts their individual journeys. You know, there were books about their extraordinary legal legacy, the way that, you know, their fight for justice transformed health and safety in the workplace. There were books about the science of the story, but there wasn't a book about the women. And that is the book that I have written because it was the book I thought they deserved.

SPEAKER_00 50:23 And and just knowing this about the women and stories like you've just communicated, did you feel like connected through time with them?

SPEAKER_01 50:32 Yes. Almost in a sort of weirdly intimate way, the connection, because obviously, you know, I'm British. This is an American story. It was a that there were British dial painters as well, but the women I chose to focus on were American. You know, I travelled 4,000 miles across an ocean to follow this story, track down the sons, daughters, sisters of these women. And I felt, felt and feel so passionate about their story. And I would quite happily talk about the Radium Girls for the rest of my life because they are, you know, I feel like our lives are intertwined, and it's an enormous privilege to be an advocate for them.

SPEAKER_00 51:15 And so finally, like, when did everything stop then? When did we stop making using radium for clock dials? And you mentioned the products were phased out by the 1930s. Like, yeah, w when did we s suddenly wake up, I guess?

SPEAKER_01 51:28 Yeah, well, I think um, you know, what's interesting about the radium dials in particular is they didn't stop. You know, they actually were probably phased out in the 1960s, that sort of time. But what they did was they brought in safety standards. So people were not exposed in the same way. Obviously, lip pointing was banned. Um, there were protective equipment issued, they were, you know, designed these kind of glass hoods to protect the workers who were still working with radium dials. So, you know, change is slow, but change did eventually come. And I think it's a case that shows how important it is to respect the sacrifices of the past because sometimes there can be a lot of discussion about rolling back red tape. And actually, a case like this shows us why the red tape is there and how important it is to follow those safety standards that have been inspired by the people who came before.

SPEAKER_00 52:24 Well, it is an incredibly powerful story, and I'm so glad that you came to it and you were able to take it from this perspective of the women themselves, because what an extraordinary and stunning work, a piece of work that you've you've done and continue to do telling the story. Um, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 52:41 Likewise, that thank you for the opportunity to tell people about them. This is like that was why I wanted to write the book because I felt these women deserve to be remembered, and here we are remembering them. So thank you.

SPEAKER_00 52:54 Absolutely. Yeah, thank you, Kate. A massive thank you to Kate and to you for listening. And if you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe, follow, whatever your app lets you do. It's all very much appreciated. I'm Molly, this is what we did before, and I will see you next time.