Radium Girls, Women and Industrial Health Reform: 1910-1935

Nearly a decade after the Cold War’s end, the specter of radioactivity has hardly diminished its grip on the contemporary imagination. Claudia Clark’s new book opens up a post-Cold War perspective on this hazard’s formative influence on modern anxieties toward technological risk. Long before the atomic bomb, a luminescent and highly radioactive substance called radium had already wended its way into factories and homes. The interwar workplace in particular, maintains Clark, was the place where radium’s more subtle but serious dangers began to be recognized: there, young women hired to gratify the latest consumer fad for illuminated watch dials became the first plentiful and unmistakable victims of the atomic age. Their and their allies’ protracted and bitter struggle for some modicum of justice gave an American medico-scientific elite its first inklings of the perils of putting the atom to work.

Radium Girls tells the harrowing tale of these women who, in the years just after World War I, devoted most of their waking hours to painting radium onto watch faces in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois factories. As some of them broke out with mysterious swellings and soreness around their mouths, they began to frequent dentists and oral surgeons. Many had teeth extracted, or even parts of their jaws removed; they and some who operated on them came to suspect exposures on their job. By 1924, officials at U.S. Radium had gotten wind of these “rumors and comments” and brought in an investigator from Harvard’s newly founded department of “industrial hygiene,” Cecil Drinker. Simultaneously, this company launched upon a decades-long pathway of official denial that would do R. J. Reynolds proud.

Enter Katherine Wiley, the intrepid president of the New Jersey Consumers’ League. Marshaling the political clout of a largely female network of social reformers, Wiley pressed for official investigations to prove the existence of an occupational hazard. She succeeded in recruiting investigators like Frederic Hoffman and Harrison Martland and, with the help of Alice Hamilton, forcing medical and public recognition of “radium necrosis.” Wiley and her Consumers’ League then became the watch-dial worker-victims’ foremost advocates during a prolonged battle for justice and compensation in state legislatures and courts, made all the more difficult by the reluctance of experts like Martland and Drinker to testify in court on the workers’ behalf.

Clark’s single greatest contribution to the recent spate of literature on the history of occupational health is her thorough recapturing of the industrial-disease experience of a group of workers. Selecting the most documented of these episodes from the workers’ standpoint prior to World War II—thanks to extensive media coverage, as well as dial worker Katherine Schaub’s autobiography—Clark skillfully reconstructs what it was like to be a radium watch-dial worker. We gain vivid glimpses of their lives—from how they playfully painted their clothes, eyebrows, and teeth with what seemed a wondrous and innocuous substance, to how hobbled, depressed, and fearful Schaub and the others became in their final years.

In other ways, too, Clark contributes significantly to our understanding of the controversies that erupted around occupational diseases in this period. She is especially strong on the legal avenues of redress pursued by the radium girls and their allies, and on the reasons why these veered toward limited, out-of-court settlements. Comparing judicial process and outcome in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois, she shows how deeply controversies over occupational disease could be informed by differences in state laws, politics, and institutions. Clark also bids to go beyond the exclusively productionist focus of much recent history of occupational health, by considering radium as a medicine and a consumer product. She uncovers some intriguing contrasts: for instance, between a willingness to believe in radium’s therapeutic value and a reluctance to imagine that it could harm workers. But such analyses are only partly integrated into what remains essentially a narrative...