Radium Girls, Corporate Boys

Dialpainting became an occupation in 1917 when young women from working-class backgrounds, most of them in their teens and early twenties, were hired to decorate the faces of watches used by soldiers in the trenches with a new paint containing radium. The military’s needs declined, but in 1919 consumers launched a decade-long fad in luminous wristwatches, and by the mid-1920s, “studios” in Orange, New Jersey; Ottawa, Illinois; and Waterbury, Connecticut employed hundreds of dialpainters. Ignorant of the hazards of their work, the dialpainters breathed dusty air saturated with radium, painted eyelids and fingernails for evening social engagements, and, in what was the most dangerous practice of all, pointed the brush by placing it between their lips—that is, “lippointing.”

Lippointing was abolished throughout the industry in 1927, but not before dozens of dialpainters had died, contracted malignant cancers, suffered facial disfigurement, or otherwise become seriously ill, their bones burdened with radium. Dialpainters who began work after the elimination of lippointing fared better, and voluntary radium tolerance standards developed during World War II added a measure of protection for some workers. Even so, dialpainters working in the 1940s and 1950s and later decades suffered from a variety of radium-related illnesses and were subject to higher-than-normal rates of breast cancer and foot tumors. Not until 1979 or 1980 was the last dialpainting facility closed.

Radium Girls is a dense, thoroughly researched, and highly interpretive account of the experience of the radium girls in the first two decades of dialpainting, when the occupation was most dangerous, least understood, and its consequences most hotly contested. The account contains significant discussions of the science of radium; of industrial health reform (including workers’ compensation); and of state and, to a lesser degree, national politics.

What happened to the radium girls is outrageous and obscene, an experimentation with human life akin to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments or the electric shock treatments that victimized actress Frances Farmer, among others. Perhaps fearful of swamping her story in a deluge of anger and bathos, Claudia Clark consciously avoids the terminology used by the tabloids of the day, whose headlines cast the dialpainters as “Ottawa’s Doomed Women” or “Ottawa’s Living Dead” (p. 191). Without denying that what happened to these women was unredeemably awful, and without entirely dispensing with the theme of culpability, Clark opts for a remarkably dispassionate critique, framing the tragedy of the dialpainters—as well as the achievements of the industrial hygiene movement—as the product of economic, political, and social institutions and systems.

Clark is least successful in using this “systems” approach to explain the conduct of the dialpainting industry. Officials of the major dialpainting companies—U.S. Radium (New Jersey), Radium Dial (Illinois), and the Waterbury Clock Company (Connecticut) come off here as immoral thugs who understood that radium was hazardous and yet left their employees ignorant of its dangers and uninstructed as to how those dangers might be avoided or mitigated (“We slapped radium around like cake frosting,” recalled an employee [p. 197]); concealed the existence of radium poisoning in their factories; engaged in corporate reorganization to avoid liability; opposed meaningful systems of workers’ compensation; used their legal muscle to deny victims reasonable recompense; moved out of state to avoid troublesome regulation; and otherwise acted badly.

While the description is doubtless an accurate one, it does not come with a “system” that explains it fully. The dialpainting industry does not appear to have been subject to the sort of intense competition (and low profit margins) that might have “forced” a company to cut corners in order to survive. ¹ Instead, Clark floats several intriguing arguments. One is that because the radium companies were able to produce their own knowledge about the hazards of radium (they financed the research), they were better able to justify their policies and attitudes. Another, derived from David Montgomery’s Workers’ Control in America (1979), is that business, having finally...