The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

Media interest in the women’s cases ebbed and flowed but ultimately acted in the women’s favor. Media coverage motivated people to care about the plight of poor women workers, and even helped bring down the radium companies. Importantly, the media coverage linked the “Radium Girls” story to a wider narrative about workers’ rights, and the story was in several instances picked up and politicized by socialist papers. While the women in the book did not make openly political analyses about their struggle, the newspapers made this link on their behalf. Socialist politician Norman Thomas, for instance, called the case a “vivid example of the ways of an unutterably selfish capitalist system which cares nothing about the lives of its workers, but seeks only to guard its profits” (276).

Media coverage of Eben Byer’s case had profound impacts on the radium industry, and contributed to huge profit loss and loss of public trust for USRC. This high-profile case was only so well-known because the newspapers latched onto the case.

Having a good reporter on their side was an important aspect of winning the case for the Ottawa dial-painters. When they needed a lawyer, they used their connection at the Chicago Times Daily to shed light on Radium Dial’s behavior and share the women’s stories. This helped publicly shame Radium Dial for moving suddenly to New York City from Ottawa and helped them secure a lawyer to take up their case. Later, publicity led many citizens to write to the women to express their support for their struggle.

Finally, the media had a meaningful and lasting role in ensuring that safety regulations were instated in other work involving radioactive materials. Had the dial-painters’ cases gone unnoticed, radium companies would have continued to get away with harmful practices. This would have spilled over into other radioactive materials and projects—most notably the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb. As Moore explains in the Epilogue, the coverage of the dial-painters’ cases was what forced companies to make safety standards commonplace. 

Through documenting the twists and turns of the dial-painters’ cases, Moore also documents the many ways the legal system failed to protect workers. The corporations exploited the workers and provided them with no protection. When the workers eventually fell ill and died, the companies denied responsibility through evolving means—first, they denied that radium was harmful at all, settling out of court out of “charity.” Then, they used the statute of limitations to avoid blame while also admitting that radium was harmful but denying that radium was a poison in the technical sense. This demonstrates the legal system’s inadequacy in protecting workers, even when the “correct” course of action was clear. The legal system failed the dial-painters even after it was widely known that the company knowingly exploited them. Even the cost of hiring a lawyer and bringing the cases to court presented a barrier to the women seeking justice, and they needed to rely on pro bono lawyers in many cases.

Eventually, their lawsuits and efforts helped other workers gain workplace legal protections, as Moore explains in the Epilogue about the Manhattan Project. However, the Postscript reveals that the companies and executives were not held entirely accountable, as radium poisoning cases were still reported as late as the 1970s due to Luminous Processes’ workplace practices. This demonstrates the difficulty in seeking justice and holding all corporations to account when going through the law. Lawsuits are expensive and draining and many workers did not see it as worth it to go through the process of suing their former employers, especially with declining health.