9/18/2023 0 Comments Examples of radium poisoningThe Dial Painters’ StoryĪt age 15, in 1917, Katherine Schaub and her cousin Irene Rudolf had begun working at the dial painting studio of the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in Orange, New Jersey. Residues from the dial painting studios of the 1920s were reused to make sand for children’s sand boxes when asked about its potential toxicity the company’s owner described it as more beneficial than the mud of the world-renowned curative baths.Īlthough primarily a case study in the history of the industrial health movement (today more commonly called the occupational safety and health movement), the book also provides an understanding of the situation of one sector of working class women, and the strengths and weaknesses of one of the major middle class women’s social reform organizations of the Progressive Era in the period of World War I. In this account, Claudia Clark describes the intricate scientific and political process by which radium evolved from being viewed as a wonderfully medicinal element to being recognized as a dangerous toxic material and a cause of occupational disease. The Consumers’ League’s struggle for the radium girls represented a classic case of the struggles for reform at the beginning of the century – against capitalists who deceived their employees, corporate physicians who covered up health problems, state health departments that ignored workers’ complaints, and a public which remained ignorant of the important issues involved for the entire society. In this case, government investigators and scientific experts, beholden to the corporations, were either unresponsive or hostile to the pleas of these suffering women. With their middle class female reformer allies, they fought to make the companies take responsibility for the illness and to make the government regulate issues of workers’ health.Īlthough the dial painters were just a small group of women workers – between 19 only about 2,000 altogether – their plight, Clark argues, became an excellent example of the failures of the philosophy of Progressive Era corporatism or corporate liberalism, where the state’s role was to remain a “neutral partner.” Clark’s Radium Girls tells the story of how these young women workers refused to be passive victims. Professor Claudia Clark of Central Michigan University was drawn to this story, in part, by her own previous experience as a chemical plant worker. Finally they turned to the Consumers League, a reform organization founded by Florence Kelley, the socialist organizer who worked with Jane Addams at Hull House, the famous settlement house in Chicago. $17.95 paperĪT THE BEGINNING of this century a group of young women workers who, while licking their brushes to make a fine point, applied radium-laden paint to the faces of watches and instruments, began to sicken, and in many cases to die.īelieving that their work was making them ill, the girls turned to their doctors, then to state health and labor departments, but received little help. Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910–1935īy Claudia Clark Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Claudia Clark’s “Radium Girls” | Solidarity Claudia Clark’s Radium Girls - Dr.
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