Michael: In the 1920s, the most valuable substance on earth was radium, worth over $2 million a gram in today's money. Companies hired young women for a glamorous job painting it onto watches. The one tool they insisted the girls use? Their own lips. Kevin: Hold on. Their lips? To paint with a radioactive substance? That sounds like something out of a dystopian horror film, not American history. Michael: It's the chilling reality at the heart of Kate Moore's bestseller, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women. And it’s a story that was almost completely forgotten. Kevin: And Moore is the perfect person to tell this story. She's a former editor who is obsessed with uncovering forgotten histories, and this book deservedly won the Goodreads Choice Award for History. It’s a story that absolutely needed to be told. Michael: Exactly. And it all begins with a promise that seems almost magical, a dream job for a generation of young women stepping into the workforce for the first time.

Kevin: What was the big draw? I mean, besides the obvious fact that they didn't know it was deadly. Michael: Well, for starters, it was glamorous. This was 1917. America is just entering World War I. These young women, some as young as fourteen, are leaving grueling, low-wage factory jobs for this new, exciting industry. They were told they were artists, painting these tiny, delicate numbers on watch faces so soldiers could see them in the dark trenches of Europe. Kevin: So there's a patriotic angle. They're helping the war effort. Michael: Absolutely. And the pay was incredible. The book notes that some of these women were earning more than three times the average factory worker. They were in the top 5 percent of female wage-earners. They could buy beautiful clothes, go out dancing. They had financial independence their mothers could only dream of. Kevin: Okay, I can see the appeal. Good money, a sense of purpose, and it's seen as high-status work. But let's get back to the lips. How on earth did that become the official technique? Michael: It was a technique called 'lip-pointing,' or 'lip, dip, paint.' They were given these fine camel-hair brushes. To get a perfect, sharp point, the forewoman would instruct them to twirl the bristles between their lips. Then they’d dip it in the crucible of glowing green paint, and paint the dial. Lip, dip, paint. Over and over, hundreds of times a day. Kevin: Swallowing a tiny bit of radium with every single dial. Wow. And nobody questioned this? Michael: The girls did! The book is filled with anecdotes of new hires asking, "Does this stuff hurt you?" And the managers, like a Mr. Savoy mentioned by one of the girls, would laugh and say, "No, of course not. It's not dangerous, you don't need to be afraid." They were even told a little radium would be good for them, that it would put roses in their cheeks. Kevin: That is just pure evil. They were literally selling it as a health tonic. Michael: It gets even more surreal. The girls became known as the "ghost girls." They were covered in the luminous dust. Their clothes, their hair, even their skin would glow in the dark. They thought it was a fantastic party trick. They'd go to the dance halls after work and be the center of attention, these ethereal, shining women. They were literally radiant. Kevin: A walking, talking symbol of their own poisoning. That's a chilling image. How long did it take for the dream to turn into a nightmare? Michael: It took years. That's the insidious nature of radium. It's a bone-seeker. It mimics calcium, so the body deposits it directly into the bones, where it sits and emits radiation for the rest of your life, hollowing you out from the inside. The first signs were often dental. Take Mollie Maggia. She was one of the first. Kevin: What happened to her? Michael: It started with a toothache in 1921. Her dentist pulled a tooth. The socket never healed. It just bled and filled with pus. Then he pulled another. Same thing. Soon, her entire mouth was a mess of ulcers and unhealed wounds. The pain was excruciating. Then, the real horror began. One day, her dentist gently probed her jaw, and a piece of it just broke off in his fingers. Kevin: Oh my god. Broke off? Like it was chalk? Michael: Exactly. The book describes it as being like crumbling punk wood. The radium had completely rotted her jawbone from the inside. Her entire lower jaw was eventually removed. She hemorrhaged to death in September 1922. She was only twenty-four. Kevin: And the cause of death on her certificate? Michael: This is the ultimate betrayal. The company's doctors, who knew about the dangers, conspired to cover it up. They pressured her doctor to list the cause of death as syphilis. Kevin: Of course they did. They smeared her reputation to protect their profits. It's a classic playbook. Blame the victim, especially if the victim is a woman. Michael: It was a deliberate strategy to discredit her and any other girls who started showing symptoms. They were suggesting these working-class women were morally corrupt and that their illnesses were their own fault. Meanwhile, more and more of Mollie's former colleagues were starting to feel that same tell-tale ache in their jaws.

Kevin: That is just infuriating. So you have this pattern of corporate denial and victim-blaming. How does this story shift from just a series of individual tragedies to a collective fight? Michael: It starts with one woman's incredible persistence: Grace Fryer. She was one of the dial-painters, and by the mid-1920s, she was suffering terribly. Her spine was disintegrating, and she needed a steel back brace to even sit up. She knew, intuitively, that her work was the cause. But when she tried to find a lawyer, she was turned away by dozens. No one wanted to take on the U.S. Radium Corporation. Kevin: Why not? Was the company that powerful? Michael: Immensely powerful. And the legal system was stacked against the women. The key obstacle was the statute of limitations. In New Jersey, you had to file a claim for occupational injury within two years. But as we saw with Mollie, it could take five years or more for the most devastating symptoms of radium poisoning to appear. Kevin: Wait, so the law itself was protecting the company? The clock runs out before you even know you're sick? That's insane. Michael: It was a perfect legal trap. The company knew it. They used it to delay and deny, hoping the girls would either give up or die before they could ever see a courtroom. It took Grace Fryer two years just to find a lawyer, a young attorney named Raymond Berry, who was willing to take the case. Kevin: So what was the turning point? How did they prove it was the radium? Michael: The hero of this part of the story is a medical examiner named Dr. Harrison Martland. He was a brilliant, principled man who became the county physician in Newark. He was skeptical of the company's claims and started his own investigation. He was the one who exhumed Mollie Maggia's body and proved, definitively, that her bones were intensely radioactive. Kevin: He dug up her body? That must have been a huge deal. Michael: It was. And he didn't stop there. He developed groundbreaking techniques to test the living girls. One test involved measuring the radioactivity in their breath. Another used photographic film placed against their bodies, which would become exposed by the gamma rays emitting from their bones. He created the first concrete, scientific proof that these women were, as he put it, "luminous." Kevin: So now they have undeniable proof. The company must have folded then, right? Michael: Not a chance. They doubled down. They hired their own "experts," led by a professor from Harvard, to produce a fraudulent report that concluded the paint was harmless. The book reveals that the company secretly edited the report, removing all the findings that pointed to the dangers. They then used this sham study to reassure the public and fight the girls in court. Kevin: That's not just negligence anymore. That's a criminal conspiracy. It reminds me of the big tobacco playbook, funding their own "science" to create doubt. Michael: It's the exact same strategy. The courtroom battle was brutal. The company's lawyers dragged it out, hoping the women would die before a verdict. And some of them did. The press called it "the case of the five women who are doomed to die." They were so sick they had to be carried into the courtroom on stretchers. One couldn't even raise her arm to take the oath. Kevin: This is heartbreaking. How did they keep fighting? Michael: Through sheer force of will. And the public was on their side. The newspaper coverage, led by a crusading journalist named Walter Lippmann, turned the tide of public opinion. He painted the U.S. Radium Corporation as a villain, and the public was outraged. The pressure became immense. Kevin: So the settlement they eventually got, was it a real victory? Michael: It was a partial victory. In 1928, the New Jersey girls settled out of court. They each received a lump sum of $10,000 and a $600 annual pension for life, plus all their medical bills would be paid by the company. It wasn't a lot, even then, but it was an admission of liability. More importantly, it set a precedent. Kevin: And this wasn't just happening in New Jersey, right? The book covers a second group of women in Illinois. Michael: Yes, in Ottawa, Illinois, at a company called Radium Dial. The same story played out a few years later. The same lies, the same lip-pointing, the same horrific illnesses. A woman named Catherine Donohue led that fight. Her case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear the company's final appeal in 1939. That was the final, definitive victory.

Kevin: It's just staggering to think about. These women, literally falling apart, took on some of the most powerful corporate and legal forces in the country and won. Michael: And that's the core of it. The "shining lie" wasn't just about the glowing paint. It was about a system that saw these young, working-class women as utterly disposable cogs in a machine. Their fight wasn't just for money to cover their medical bills. It was a fight to be recognized as human beings, a fight to have their suffering acknowledged. Kevin: And their legacy is monumental. It's not just a sad story from the past. Michael: Not at all. Their struggle led directly to life-saving regulations. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, was established in large part because of cases like this. The legal precedents they set gave workers the right to sue their employers for damages from occupational diseases. The right to know the dangers of the materials you work with—that's a right they paid for with their lives. Kevin: It's incredible. Their suffering laid the foundation for the workplace safety we take for granted today. It makes you wonder, what invisible dangers are we ignoring right now? Michael: That's a powerful question. We're surrounded by new technologies and new chemicals, and we're often told they're perfectly safe. The story of the Radium Girls is a brutal reminder that corporate profits and human safety are often in direct conflict, and that we have to remain vigilant. Kevin: It's a call to honor their memory not just by reading their story, but by questioning the systems around us. Michael: Exactly. And Kate Moore's book does such a beautiful job of ensuring we never forget them, not as statistics, but as the vibrant, courageous women they were: Catherine, Grace, Mollie, and all the others. Kevin: We'd love to hear what our listeners think. What modern parallels do you see to the Radium Girls' story? Let us know your thoughts. This is Aibrary, signing off.