The Radium Girls’ Eternal Glow: Politics, Gender, and Malpractice in the American Radium Industry

Abstract

During the 1920s, radium permeated all aspects of American life from media to recreation to food due to pro-laissez faire laws that allowed the U.S. radium industry to adopt vertical integration business models and use illegal advertising methods. One of the largest radium corporations was the United States Radium Corporation which employed thousands of young girls in New Jersey and Illinois to paint radium watches for the U.S. military. While radium companies were aware of the lethal consequences of radium consumption, they continued to hire employees to handle the substance without proper protection and distributed their products on a mass scale, leading to hundreds of deaths and chronic illnesses. My paper builds on existing scholarship that has focused on the policy failures surrounding the Radium Girls while adding an overlooked unit of analysis: gender. This paper is a product of a year’s worth of researching secondary and primary sources online, visiting museums and archival collections, analyzing previous American industrial health laws, and consultations with PhD students at Yale University specializing in American history. My paper concludes that the tragic tale of the Radium Girls is an account of gender-based violence on a massive scale. The USRC took advantage of the women’s gender statuses to build a workforce considered expendable in society, and thus discounted by the media and law. As a result, the USRC and the U.S. government exploited the girls for decades, confident that the public would not demand justice in their names.