Narrator: In the early 20th century, a new element, radium, was the wonder of the world. It glowed in the dark with an ethereal light, and its discovery earned Marie Curie a Nobel Prize. It was also the most valuable substance on earth, worth over two million dollars a gram in today's currency. For the young, working-class women of New Jersey and Illinois, it offered a dream job. They were hired to paint watch dials with luminous radium paint, earning salaries that placed them in the top 5% of female wage-earners. They became known as the "shining girls," their clothes, hair, and skin literally glowing after a day's work. To get a fine point on their brushes, their supervisors taught them a simple, deadly technique: lip, dip, paint. With every dial, they swallowed a small dose of poison. When these shining girls began to fall ill with mysterious and horrific ailments—jaws that crumbled, bones that fractured, and bodies riddled with tumors—the companies that employed them denied everything. This is the story of their betrayal and their courageous fight for justice. Kate Moore’s exhaustively researched book, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women, chronicles this dark chapter in American history, revealing a harrowing tale of corporate greed, scientific discovery, and the incredible resilience of women who refused to be silenced.

Narrator: In 1917, radium was a miracle. It was marketed as a cure-all, infused in everything from cosmetics to tonics. For young women like Katherine Schaub and Grace Fryer, a job at the United States Radium Corporation (USRC) was a ticket to a better life. The work was considered glamorous, artistic, and exceptionally well-paid. The studio was filled with laughter and camaraderie as the girls painted hundreds of watch dials a day.

The key to their speed and precision was the "lip-pointing" technique. They were instructed to place the camel-hair brush between their lips to shape it into a fine point before dipping it into the radium-laced paint. When some girls expressed concern about swallowing the material, their managers, including the company's founder, Dr. Sabin von Sochocky, assured them it was harmless. In fact, they were told a little radium would put roses in their cheeks. The girls embraced their work, playing with the glowing dust, painting their nails and teeth with it for fun, and going home shining in the dark.

Yet, the company knew the truth. Dr. von Sochocky himself suffered from radium burns on his fingers and protected himself with lead screens and ivory-tipped tongs in the laboratory. The chemists who handled the raw material were given protective equipment, but the dial-painters—the girls on the factory floor—were given none. In a moment of conscience, von Sochocky once warned Grace Fryer, "Do not do that. You will get sick." But he never enforced the rule, and the forewomen, under pressure to maintain productivity, actively encouraged the practice. Profit was paramount, and the girls were unknowingly ingesting their own death sentence, one glowing dial at a time.

Narrator: The first sign that something was terribly wrong came with Mollie Maggia. In 1922, she began suffering from a severe toothache. Her dentist pulled a tooth, but the socket never healed. Then another tooth was pulled, and another. The pain spread, and her mouth filled with agonizing ulcers. In a horrifying moment, as her dentist gently probed her mouth, her entire jawbone fractured and came away in his hands. Mollie died a slow, agonizing death at the age of twenty-four. The company, eager to avoid suspicion, paid a doctor to list her cause of death as syphilis, a cruel lie that stained her reputation and concealed the true culprit.

Soon, other girls began to sicken and die with similar, gruesome symptoms. As the death toll rose, USRC launched a campaign of deliberate misinformation. They denied any link between their product and the illnesses, commissioning fraudulent studies to clear their name. They hired a Harvard researcher, Dr. Cecil Drinker, to investigate, but when his report confirmed the link between radium and the girls' poisoning and condemned the company's practices, USRC suppressed it. They systematically lied to the public, to the medical community, and most cruelly, to the women themselves, assuring them their work was safe while knowing it was a death sentence.

Narrator: The company's wall of denial began to crack thanks to the integrity of a few key individuals. Dr. Harrison Martland, a county medical examiner in New Jersey, became suspicious after a USRC chemist died of a disease that looked suspiciously like the dial-painters' illness. Martland conducted an autopsy and, for the first time in medical history, tested human bones for radioactivity. The results were conclusive: the chemist had died from radium poisoning.

Martland then turned his attention to the living girls. He developed groundbreaking tests to detect radium in their bodies, including a gamma-ray test and an expired-air method that measured the radioactive gas they exhaled. The tests proved what the girls had suspected all along: they were radioactive. Sarah Maillefer, one of the first to be tested, died shortly after, and Martland's autopsy confirmed her body was saturated with radium. He went public with his findings, declaring a new industrial poison had been discovered. In response, USRC went on the attack, attempting to discredit Martland as a quack and his findings as ridiculous. But the scientific proof was undeniable, and the truth was finally coming to light.

Narrator: Armed with a diagnosis, the radium girls sought justice, but the path was fraught with obstacles. They faced a two-year statute of limitations, which had long since passed for most of them. They were running out of time, money, and most importantly, life. Their case seemed hopeless until a young, determined lawyer named Raymond Berry took them on. In Ottawa, Illinois, where the Radium Dial Company had opened another factory, a similar tragedy was unfolding. There, a lawyer named Leonard Grossman championed the cause of the dying women.

The legal battles were grueling. The companies used every delay tactic possible, hoping the women would die before a verdict could be reached. The case of Catherine Donohue became a national sensation. Too weak to attend court, the judge agreed to a dramatic bedside hearing. The courtroom—judge, lawyers, and press—convened in her small home as she lay on a daybed, emaciated but resolute, giving her testimony. Her courage, and that of the other women, captured the nation's heart. Public outrage mounted, and the media dubbed them "the living dead." After years of fighting, the women won settlements. It wasn't a fortune, but it was a victory. They had forced a powerful corporation to admit its guilt and take responsibility.

Narrator: The radium girls' fight for justice did not end with their court cases or even their deaths. Their sacrifice created a legacy that would save countless lives. Their landmark case led to sweeping reforms in workplace safety regulations and established the right of individual workers to sue corporations for damages from labor abuse. Their struggle was a direct catalyst for the eventual creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the federal agency that protects workers to this day.

Furthermore, their bodies became an invaluable, if tragic, source of scientific knowledge. As the world entered the atomic age, scientists studying the effects of radiation on the human body turned to the radium girls. Their bones, still radioactive decades later, provided the world's only data on the long-term effects of internal radiation exposure. This research was critical to the Manhattan Project, where scientists used the radium girls' data to establish safety protocols for workers handling plutonium. The women who had been poisoned by corporate greed in the 1920s were, in effect, protecting the atomic workers of the 1940s and beyond. In 2011, a bronze statue was unveiled in Ottawa, Illinois, a monument not just to their suffering, but to their enduring strength and world-changing legacy.

Narrator: The most powerful takeaway from The Radium Girls is the profound and lasting impact that a courageous fight for justice can have, even when waged by those with the least power against the most formidable opponents. It is a stark reminder that progress is often paid for by the suffering of individuals who refuse to be silenced. The story of these shining women is not just a historical account of corporate malfeasance; it is a timeless and urgent warning. It compels us to look at the innovations and conveniences of our own time and ask a difficult question: Who are the radium girls of today, and what shining promises might be hiding a dark and deadly truth?