Okay, so, I’ve been digging into this whole “Radium Girls” thing, and man, it’s a heavy story. I started looking into it because I heard about this book, “The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women,” by Kate Moore. I didn’t read the book, just kind of skimmed summaries and stuff online, but it got me thinking about the whole situation and how it all wrapped up. So I decided to put together some notes about the ending of this whole mess, the falling action, if you will.

First off, I started by figuring out the basic timeline. These girls were painting watch dials with radium paint, right? Turns out, this went on until the 1970s! Can you believe that? Anyway, I noticed that around 1925, one of the former workers, Grace Fryer, decided she’d had enough and wanted to take legal action.
Then, I looked into what happened with the lawsuit. It was a huge deal, like, everyone was watching. These women were sick, really sick, and they were blaming the company. They were losing their teeth, getting horrible sores, just awful stuff. I found that scientists started to realize how bad radium was after World War I, and that the first woman to get sick, Mollie Maggia, started having symptoms in the early 1920s in New Jersey.
So, these women, they banded together and sued. I researched the legal battle a bit, and it seems like it was a total circus. The companies, of course, were trying to dodge responsibility. Ultimately, they settled out of court in 1928. Each of the women got $10,000, plus a yearly amount of $600 which would be paid out at $12 a week. It’s something, but honestly, it feels pretty small considering what they went through.
What stuck with me…
- It went on for so long: Using radium like that until the 1970s is just mind-blowing to me.
- The fight for justice: These women were incredibly brave to stand up for themselves.
- The small settlement: It just doesn’t seem like enough money for all that suffering.
And get this, I read that the judge who helped with the settlement owned stock in the radium company! Talk about a conflict of interest, right? Anyway, the whole thing had a big impact on labor laws in the US, which is good. It helped make workplaces safer, I guess. They say that if you take a Geiger counter to the graves of these women, it’ll still go off today.
It’s a really sad story, but important, I think. It’s a reminder of how easily people can be exploited, and how important it is to fight for what’s right, even when it’s hard.
