The Radium Girls— The History of Human’s Greatest Poisoning: Greed and Radium

Written by Hannah Chun

Humans are, in many ways, frail. Consuming the wrong flowers, touching the wrong mushrooms and being bitten by the wrong mosquitoes  all send us to early graves. Despite that, humans are strong, capable of things the rest of mammals on the planet are not. Handling fire, maneuvering complex machines, not only burning but annihilating a forest to a crisp… or even raising an entire civilisation from scratch. Yet, much too often, we are killed by our own creations.

‘The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women’ by Kate H. Moore tackles both these fundamental weaknesses of humans: both physical limitations and selfishness— along with the unwavering bravery of the same species set on the edge of death. 

‘The Radium Girls’ is a biography, featuring dial painters in the early 20th century - the century of the ‘radium craze’ in the United States. Fooled by the illusion of bright fluorescence, people loved Radium, gobbling it up as a fashion and health trend. The haunting glow that radium possessed was America’s fascination during the turn of the century, not being aware that the very paint covering their tables and  chairs was decaying their bones as  they ate gravy and mashed potatoes for lunch.

Dial painters, who were mostly young women, handled radium paint, painting clock dials day and night with gleaming smiles. They were told that their profession was the dream; it was both sanitary and high paying. The only downside was that the women were expected to ‘lip point’ while already being covered head to toe with glistening radium dust. Lip pointing was a painting technique derived from Japan, using their lips to develop the perfect paintbrush points, which inadvertently led to them putting the radium paint directly in their mouths. This was to prevent the dial painters from wasting any paint with the incredibly precious radium in it.

Predictably, the woeful story follows young women suffering from radium poisoning as their lives are just about to bloom as adults, and the firm’s disregard for their rapidly declining health. Their unapologetic attitude begins off as simple ignorance, regretfully weaving into greed for their own pockets.

‘The Radium Girls’ captures the essence of human nature in an evocative beauty. The firms seem cruel, inhumane. And yet they are all only human, just as the brave, courageous ‘Radium Girls’ were. The girls were poisoned with radium, whilst the dial firms were poisoned by their own greed.  And so it leaves a mark on the important philosophy for us people—  what is the greatest tragedy of all? Is it the frailty of the human body, so easily undone by what it cannot perceive? Or is it the frailty of the human spirit, when greed and indifference lead to the suffering of others? The Radium Girls does not simply tell the story of the past—it forces us to confront the present. The same recklessness, the same disregard for human life, continues to echo in different forms today. But just as the Radium Girls fought back, refusing to be silenced even as their bodies failed them, so too does their legacy serve as a reminder: human weakness may be inevitable, but so is human resilience.