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American radium orange nj12/27/2023 ![]() ![]() Additionally, in order to provide more precision to their painting, they were instructed to point their paint brushes by drawing them between their lips. ![]() ![]() The dial painting studios were so filled with the dust and residues from the paint that the women’s skin and hair actually glowed when they left work. The girls earned between $20-24 per week, which was substantially more than the $15 median wage of New Jersey women at that time.Īlthough the work appeared pleasant, the women were being exposed daily to high levels of dangerous radiation. Unlike the image of the squalid sweatshops made famous by the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1910, Schaub described the dial painting studio as interesting and of far higher type than the usual factory job. They, like the majority of the dial painters, were young women from moderately well-off working class families, largely daughters and wives of skilled and semi-skilled workers. The Dial Painters’ StoryĪt age 15, in 1917, Katherine Schaub and her cousin Irene Rudolf had begun working at the dial painting studio of the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in Orange, New Jersey. Residues from the dial painting studios of the 1920s were reused to make sand for children’s sand boxes when asked about its potential toxicity the company’s owner described it as more beneficial than the mud of the world-renowned curative baths.Īlthough primarily a case study in the history of the industrial health movement (today more commonly called the occupational safety and health movement), the book also provides an understanding of the situation of one sector of working class women, and the strengths and weaknesses of one of the major middle class women’s social reform organizations of the Progressive Era in the period of World War I. In this account, Claudia Clark describes the intricate scientific and political process by which radium evolved from being viewed as a wonderfully medicinal element to being recognized as a dangerous toxic material and a cause of occupational disease. The Consumers’ League’s struggle for the radium girls represented a classic case of the struggles for reform at the beginning of the century-against capitalists who deceived their employees, corporate physicians who covered up health problems, state health departments that ignored workers’ complaints, and a public which remained ignorant of the important issues involved for the entire society. In this case, government investigators and scientific experts, beholden to the corporations, were either unresponsive or hostile to the pleas of these suffering women. With their middle class female reformer allies, they fought to make the companies take responsibility for the illness and to make the government regulate issues of workers’ health.Īlthough the dial painters were just a small group of women workers-between 19 only about 2000 altogether-their plight, Clark argues, became an excellent example of the failures of the philosophy of Progressive Era corporatism or corporate liberalism, where the state’s role was to remain a “neutral partner.” Clark’s Radium Girls tells the story of how these young women workers refused to be passive victims. Professor Claudia Clark of Central Michigan University was drawn to this story, in part, by her own previous experience as a chemical plant worker. Finally they turned to the Consumers League, a reform organization founded by Florence Kelley, the socialist organizer who worked with Jane Addams at Hull House, the famous settlement house in Chicago. $17.95 paper.ĪT THE BEGINNING of this century a group of young women workers who, while licking their brushes to make a fine point, applied radium-laden paint to the faces of watches and instruments, began to sicken, and in many cases to die.īelieving that their work was making them ill, the girls turned to their doctors, then to state health and labor departments, but received little help. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935. Capital's Global Turbulence: A Symposium.The Rebel Girl: Death of Our Hoop Dreams.Josephine Herbst's "Pity is not Enough".Review: Memoirs of An Underground Woman.NYC's Workfare Shell Game: An Interview with Heidi Dorow.Stephanie Luce interviews Randy Albelda Hugo Chávez and the Crisis of the Dependent Countries: Nationalism, Populism & Democracy.Harry Clark interviews Professor Israel Shahak Putting the Fox in Charge: What's Fair About the Fair Labor Association?.Race and Politics: Blacks in Corporate America. ![]()
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