Lip, Dip, Paint: The Tragedy of the Radium Girls

CiCi Bushay

Introduction

“They picked up their brushes and they twirled them over and over, just as they had been taught.

Lip… Dip… Paint.”

-Moore 18

The story of the Radium Girls is one that many people know. The girls went to work in radium factories in during WWI and into the 1920s, and then later died because of their exposure to the radium they worked with. What is lesser known is the true horror of the situation. Many of the girls were teenagers when they started working in the factories, and no one knew that radium was dangerous. Well, people knew. They just didn’t tell the girls. Scientists dealing with radium wore lead smocks or gloves and took many safety precautions when working with the substance. The girls, however were not told this. Day in day out, they would put the brush they used to paint the dials directly into their mouths. Some girls could do 2-3 numbers without having to re dip their brush. Some girls dipped multiple times a number. This direct ingestion of the material would lead to their deaths, though it would be years before the girls even knew they’d been poisoned.

I found this book by chance. Goodreads had a challenge going on that I decided to participate in, and one of the categories was one centered around Women’s History Month. All of the books in that category were nonfiction books about women’s stories, and they almost all sounded terrible to me. I’m not a nonfiction person, and I never have been. I find the Radium Girls interesting though, and decided to read their book because it sounded the least awful. I’m glad I wound up reading this novel, and I think it’s something that more people should read.

The novel mainly uses the opportunity to observe. As a nonfiction novel, the events have already happened. Nothing will change what is written. All the reader can do is observe the events and take it in. This observation leads to the experiences I had with it, both of horror and haunting. The prose in this novel is beautiful, but the story is a tragedy. Through observation, Moore doesn’t let the reader ignore the terrible fate of the radium girls.

Horror and Body Horror

About Marguerite Carlough:

“When her dentist pulled the teeth, a piece of decayed jawbone came out too.”

-Moore 66

“Her head, essentially, was “extremely rotten”22—with all the putrefaction that implies. But she was alive, still. Her whole head was rotting, but she was still alive.”

-Moore 121

About Mollie Maggia:

“Mollie tried to indicate that her jaw was hurting especially, and Knef prodded delicately at the bone in her mouth. To his horror and shock, even though his touch had been gentle, her jawbone broke against his fingers. He then removed it, “not by an operation, but merely by putting his fingers in her mouth and lifting it out.””

-Moore 38

About Grace Fryer:

“And so, on January 29, 1927, he fitted Grace Fryer, then twenty-seven, with a solid steel back brace. It extended from her shoulders to her waist and was held in place by two crossbars of steel; she had to wear it every single day and was permitted to take it off for only two minutes at a time”

-Moore 176

““I have had my jaws curetted seventeen times,” said Grace simply, “with pieces of the jawbone removed. Most of my teeth have been removed. [My] spine [is] decaying and one bone in [my] foot [is] totally destroyed.””

-Moore 206

I would say that this is a horror story. Goodreads doesn’t classify it as so, instead calling it nonfiction, historical, and science. These genres are objectively right, but this is also a horror story. Moore doesn’t shy away from the body horror of it all, zeroing in on how the radium ravaged the girl’s bodies. The girls slowly become more and more decrepit, the radium taking different parts of their bodies. For all women, the first sign of trouble is in their jaw, as that is the location where the radium entered their bodies. None of the doctors knew what radium poisoning was, and had to slowly learn that pulling teeth to clear the infection actually only sped it up. The girls became brittle and frail. Their cuts stopped healing and their bones began hurting. It took seven years for the poisoning to show up, a type of hurt delay in the novel. The women go about their lives, and many of them get married and try to start families before they have the slightest inkling that something is wrong.

I’ve included some descriptions of what happened due to radium, but the best way to experience it is just to read the book. Moore handles the subject with grace, but the descriptions are still gnarly. Much of the beginning of the books is dedicated to discussing the girls’ favorite parts of themselves or how beautiful they are, which is later contrasted by their rotting heads, nonfunctioning joints, and frail appearances. This is especially notable as the Radium Girls are from the 1920s. Women were beginning to have more rights, but a lot of a woman’s worth and value was still placed in how pretty she was, which to me at least, adds another layer to the horror.

Edna Bolz is described by Moore as being “nicknamed the “Dresden Doll”11 because of her beautiful golden hair and fair coloring; she also had perfect teeth and, perhaps as a result, a beaming smile” (Moore 14). Her eventual ailments include spending a year in a full plaster cast, a left leg that is shorter than the right, and an eventual locking of her legs in a crossed position. Edna breaks her leg from a slight tumble that would have left anyone else with a bruise. Her beauty is the most contrasted by her fate, but all of the girls suffer similar fates.

I found what happened to the women horrifying. The descriptions of radium poisoning were more graphic than I thought they would be – obviously the women died and it was terrible, but I didn’t realize how truly horrifying radium poisoning was. It isn’t included in our list yet, but there is a lot of dread experienced in this book – I knew what would happen to the women, and I knew what would come next for them, even though they did not. Not being able to stop what would happen and having to read about them constantly putting the radium brush in their mouths was awful.

To me, a lot of the horror and dread comes from the not knowing. The doctors had never seen radium poisoning before, and while there is no cure, they didn’t know what to do to help the girls. The doctors did their best to help, but they didn’t know what to do. There was nothing they could do to help. The girls didn’t know that it was going to lead to a rapid deterioration and early death. It took seven years for the poisoning to show – seven years of not knowing that this was dangerous and continuing to put the brush in their mouths every day that they worked. The people who did know that radium was dangerous didn’t do anything to help the girls or stop the corporations, and the only reason that the women wound up getting any compensation or justice at all was because a woman named Katherine Wiley believed them and began doing her own research and attempting to pass laws and find lawyers to help them.

Haunting Nature of the Radium Girls

And then, one night in May 1927, as she [Edna] groped in the dark for her medicine on the bureau, she caught sight of herself in a mirror. At first, she might have wondered if it was her mother Minnie returned from the grave to haunt her. For in the dead of night, in the dead of dark, a ghost girl glowed in the mirror. Edna screamed and fainted. For she knew exactly what her shining bones foretold, shimmering through her skin. She knew that glow. Only one thing on earth could make that glimmer. Radium.

-Moore 180

The girls are ghosts even before they die. The way that the radium clings to their hair and clothes gives them a ghostly appearance as they walk home from work, passing through the streets as a sort of specter. There are passages dedicated to discussing how the girls would take their younger siblings into a dark room right after work, so they could show the younger kids how they glowed in the dark and give them joy. The glowing started out as a sort of game to them, because radium was believed to be safe, and it was only on their clothes and in their hair.

Their story is haunting, but even from the beginning, each reader is likely to choose a girl as their favorite. Moore includes the names and stories of many of the Radium Girls, and even knowing that they are all cursed to die, it is hard not to hope that one of them will survive. Katherine Schaub and Grace Fryer are the two girls I was rooting for the most, and there’s a deep sense of dread reading the story and knowing that none of the girls will live. Despite knowing that they all die, it is hard not to hold out hope that some of them may survive by sheer luck. Katherine was noted as one of the girls who put the brush in her mouth most infrequently. It’s hard not to hope that her case of radium poisoning won’t be as bad as the others who put the brush in their mouth multiple times a number.

Reading their stories is eerie. It’s something I’m glad to have experienced, but reading about the women who were so vibrant and full of life dying in terrible ways due to radium poisoning was haunting. The women had no idea what was to come from their jobs, and so lived life without a care, until they no longer could. It came to a point in the legal proceedings where they decided which girl would have her case presented next because she had the least amount of time left. I found the novel itself haunting, in that despite the fact that the women are gone, their story is still told. In the pages, they are unaware of what is to come.

Haunting also isn’t on our list, but I think that it could be worthwhile to add.

Prose

The girls shone “like the watches did in the darkroom,”8 as though they themselves were timepieces, counting down the seconds as they passed. They glowed like ghosts as they walked home through the streets of Orange.

-Moore 20

Her vertebrae glowed in vertical white lights, like a regiment of matches slowly burning into black. They looked like rows of shining dial-painters, walking home from work.

-Moore 199

Despite the nature of the book, I found a lot of the prose to be very beautiful and unique. It fit the story well, but remained haunting to read. The vertebrae example in particular stood out to me, as did the many descriptions of how the girls would glow on their way home from work. I think that Moore did a great job at telling the women’s story with reverence and grace, despite the horror of the poisoning they suffered. To me, the use of the radium and glow in more general descriptions really added to the story. The world was fascinated with radium, and the descriptions give it grace when necessary and horror when not.

I would not have read this book if it weren’t for a Goodreads challenge, but I found that I really did enjoy the experience as a whole.

Works Cited

Moore, Kate. The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women (Harrowing Historical Nonfiction Bestseller About a Courageous Fight for Justice). Sourcebooks. Kindle Edition.