Great Grandma Barrett was a Shining Woman: Reflections on the Radium Girls and Industrial Disease
By Erin Elizabeth Becker
“The great wonders of the world are sometimes listed as the telephone, wireless telegraphy, radium, spectrum analysis, the airplane, anesthetics, and antitoxins and X rays.”
- The Long Island Traveler, November 13, 1925
On February 27, 1905, Marion Murdoch O’Hara was born in New York City, the daughter of two immigrants. Her father, George P. O’Hara, had immigrated to the United States from Liverpool and found work in New York City as a janitor. Her mother, Marion Dunlop, was a housewife from Scotland.[i] Growing up in New York City, the younger Marion lived with her parents and two sisters. At age seventeen, she married Aiden J. Barrett, a twenty-three-year-old immigrant from Newfoundland in Rutherford, New Jersey. “Great Grandma Barrett was a dancer in New York City,” family stories go, “and- before he met her- Great Grandpa Barrett was studying to be a Catholic priest!” The couple would go on to have nine children together- Rosemary, Marion, Florence, George, William, John, Patricia, Robert, and Alice. They lived in Mt Vernon, New York for a time, but by 1925, they had settled in the Bronx.[ii]
While the Atomic Age is usually assigned as a moniker to the era following the detonation of the first nuclear weapon at the Trinity Test in 1945, one could argue Marion came of age during an earlier radioactive craze. Radium, discovered by Polish chemist Marie Curie in 1898, swept through the news--and the market--like a firestorm. It was “a wonder element.”[iii] Radium was a miracle cure for those who could afford it; it was used to treat cancer, hay fever, gout, anxiety, and more. Wealthy men and women living along the East Coast of the United States sought out radium clinics and spas, hoping to rejuvenate their bodies and stimulate their blood. Specialists knew that radium could deposit in the bones and that it caused changes in the blood--this was viewed as a positive effect. It was added to drinks, cosmetics, clothing, accessories, and more. Radium was commercial dynamite. One advertisement for Radior Peau de Velour charged, “The big difference, however, lies in what this cream does for your skin and complexion. It not only softens and adds resiliency to skin and facial muscles. It not only imparts a soft delicate bloom to the surface. But it does what no ordinary cream can do--it energizes, invigorates, rejuvenates, because it contains Actual Radium. That is the magic behind Radior Beauty Aids.” [iv]
Postcard depicting Marie Curie; translated to English, the text reads, “Marie Skladowska-Curie, who discovered radium and received the Nobel Prize. Professor at the University of Paris. Series of portraits of women active in the field of science.”
Source: Postcard Depicting Marie Curie (191-?), Harvard Digital Collections, http://digitalcollections.library.harvard.edu/catalog/8001007234_urn-3:FHCL:25818051
Radium created products which were both aesthetically pleasing and functional. One contemporary writer argued, “One of the big commercial uses for radium in the United States is in the paint. Radium paint shines in the dark.”[v] Advertisements popped up in the papers for luminous house numbers and glowing tags to label and differentiate medicines from cleaning supplies. An advertisement in the Evening Gazette suggested, “It is not enough to put poison on one shelf and nonpoison on another, for they can get mixed up. And then assurance becomes doubly unsure. The new little tags, illuminated with an undark radium mixture that only and always glows in the dark is the safest means for pointing out medicinal dangers.”[vi] Radium could be the magic fix for all problems- domestic housework issues, beauty, and health.
Advertisement for “Premax Undark Luminous House Number”
Source: Plattsburgh Daily Press, April 29, 1922, Page 4, Image 4 http://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn84031094/1922-04-29/ed-1/seq-4/
Most importantly, radium paint was “used for watches, clocks, airplane instruments, ships’ compasses, etc, and is made by mixing minute quantities of radium with zinc sulphide.”[vii] Americans wondered at the marvel of radium watch dials. Newspapers ran articles with titles such as “YOUR WATCH A POWER PLANT” and argued, ““If you own a radium-dialed watch with luminous figures and hands, then you are the possessor of a vast power plant of no mean proportions, says the Electrical Experimenter. There is sufficient radium on your watch dial to haul your train homeward, if it could be properly applied.”[viii] Luminous watch dials had important military applications and also increased in popularity among American civilians.
Advertisement for Reliable Military Wrist Watches
Source: Tarrytown Daily News, October 18, Page 2, Image 2. http://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn92061886/1918-10-18/ed-1/seq-2/
The Radium Dial Company opened its first dial painting studio in Long Island City in 1917. In the same year, Radium Luminous Materials Corporation opened its doors in Orange, New Jersey. Marion worked at US Radium Corporation in Manhattan--she may have begun her career as a dial painter. From 1917 to 1924, approximately 800 girls worked in the New Jersey studio alone.[ix] In these dial painting studios, the young women “sat in rows, dressed in their ordinary clothes and painting dials at top speed… their hands almost a blur… each had a flat wooden tray of dials beside her-the paper dials were preprinted on a black background, leaving the numbers white, ready for printing.”[x] At the Orange plant, dial painters mixed their own luminous paint, called Undark, by mixing radium powder, gum arabic, and water. In Newark, Long Island City, Connecticut, and Illinois, these girls were often employed as young as fourteen years old. Dial painters worked without any protective equipment, unlike the male lab workers who extracted the radium. The young women were trained to ‘lip point’--shape their camel hair brushes to a point by placing the brush in their mouths--and assured by the company that the radium they ingested was not harmful to their health. Radium companies boasted that, because radium was a wonder drug, the girls should benefit from their exposure to minute amounts on a daily basis. Marion worked in the dial painting business for some time. According to her son, she worked primarily as a ‘baker’--she baked the dials after they were painted.[xi] Her daughter, Marion, worked briefly in the radium studios but hated it and quit.
Dial painting was a coveted job--the girls were paid piecework by the number of dials they painted. Moore argues the dial painters “were ranked in the top 5 percent of female wage earners and on average took home $20 ($370) a week, though the fastest painters could easily earn more, sometimes as much as double, giving the top earners an annual salary of $2080 (almost $40,000).”[xii] For a woman with several young children at home, Marion was likely grateful for the high wages and relative financial stability. At the end of the day, the girls went home from work fairly glowing from the radium dust that settled on their hair, skin, and clothing. Encouraged by public sentiment and the promise of health, Marion filled her pockets with ‘the rejects’ (dials with mistakes) and ‘radium buttons’ at the ends of the day. Radium buttons glowed light green and featured a clip on the back; they were designed for GIs to wear at night to identify each other. Marion’s children “had a great deal of fun running around with those.”[xiii] One dial painting company in New Jersey even offloaded the industrial waste from radium extraction by selling it to schools for use as playground fill as it “looked like seaside sand.”[xiv]
Plucky Marion, living in New York City during the Roaring Twenties, knew how to have fun after her shift dial painting ended for the day. Barrett family stories paint Marion as a figure larger than life. While the details vary from speaker to speaker--Marion was a Rockette, she went to dancehalls in her leisure time, she liked to ‘go out’, etc.--her independence and fierce spirit are present in every tale. It seems socialization and fun were part of working in the dial painting studios. The girls befriended their coworkers; they often shared the candy they kept on their work desks and ate lunch together, laughing and giggling over their work stations. Especially at the studio in Ottawa, the girls sometimes played games with the radium paint--drawing mustaches and funny faces on themselves and then running into the darkroom to see their designs.[xv] They went out dancing after work, invested in fashion pieces, and enjoyed their relative prosperity. Dial painting companies sponsored social events, especially summer picnics, to build loyalty and increase employee retention.
But summer picnics were poor protection against radioactive materials. The young women began to develop strange sores, pimples, fatigue, stiffness in the body, terrible tooth pain, mouth odor, and facial swellings. Molly Maggia, a dial painter in Newark, was the first radium girl to seek out help from Dr. Knef, a dentist. She was diagnosed with necrosis of the jaw after her jawbone broke during the examination. Dr Knef declared that she was “suffering from a condition not unlike phosphorus poisoning;” people suffering from phosphorus poisoning are known to develop ‘phossy jaw’ -- tooth loss, inflammation of the gums, and pain.[xvi] Other dial painters began to sicken--Irene Rudolph, Helen Quinlan, Hazel Vincent, Grace Fryer, Katherine Schaub, Quinta McDonald, and more. Though they did not yet compare notes, as more girls began to suffer and perish from these strange symptoms, many dentists across the East Coast began to suspect this mysterious illness was an occupational problem. Marguerite Carlough, a dialpainter in New Jersey, found a lawyer to take her case and filed a suit against the United States Radium Corporation. Many girls died violently painful deaths.
As early as 1912, the radium industry knew handling radium could be dangerous. Seeking to protect themselves from legal repercussions and ethical responsibilities, Radium Dial Company and others began medical testing of their employees. They did not provide the girls with their results. In June of 1925, twenty-year-old Miss Martine Letsch of 236 Mount Vernon Ave, Orange, NJ was found to have flushed skin and a bilateral enlargement of the thyroid gland; she had worked with US Radium Corporation as a dial painter for a year and a half.[xvii] Thirty-five-year-old Miss Elizabeth Edwards of 69 Center Street, Nutley, NJ was found to have “enlarged cryptic tonsils” and stiffness in her right ankle.[xviii] Edwards “refused to have teeth examined, teeth soft and decayed.” Edwards had worked as a painter with US Radium Corporation for a year and a half, and as a dial painter with Henry Bank & Co. for six years. While some girls died quickly, the disease took years to manifest in others; when it did, it came in the form of sarcoma. In her recent book, about the radium girls, author Claudia Clark argues that “business influence… explains the hostility or indifference on the part of government bureaucrats and medical specialists to the dialpainters’ tripartite campaign for recognition of radium poisoning, compensation for its victims, and prevention of future cases.”[xix]
According to Clark, “in the dialpainting cases, women workers and women reformers formed an effective coalition that proved the existence of a new industrial disease.”[xx] Reformers such as Katherine Wiley, the former dial painters, doctors, and lawyers all pushed for the government to thoroughly investigate the industry. In the wake of scientific findings attesting to radium’s harm, they clamored for radium poisoning to join the ranks of legally recognized industrial disease. Their biggest challenge lay in proving the link between their illness and the radium they had been continually exposed to, day after day. The women, their families, and the media banded together in a campaign for justice and to prevent further suffering, even though they knew many of them would never live to see justice or reparations. The case did draw attention to the need for government supervision and regulation of the use of radioactive substances, worker health safeguards like protective materials, and the danger of radioactive materials.
The U.S. Radium Corporation site in Orange, New Jersey was placed on the Superfund program’s National Priorities List in 1983 after it was found to have a hazardous level of radioactivity. According to the EPA, “Waste from the plant was disposed of on and off the facility property, contaminating the site and nearby properties with radium-226… When people are directly exposed to radiation, inhale radioactive dust particles, or inadvertently ingest radioactive particles they may suffer adverse health effects in the form of an increased risk of certain types of cancer.”[xxi] In February of 1989, David E. Pitt reported, “The Federal Government is about to begin the process of removing dangerously radioactive radium from an abandoned medical supply plant in Woodside, Queens, and officials are planning a campaign to reassure neighborhood businesses and residents about the safety of the four-month operation.”[xxii] The radioactive materials were removed from the Radium Chemical Company, operated by Joseph A. Kelly, the son of the owner of Radium Dial Company in Ottawa. According to reporters, “The Queens site is believed to have the world's largest concentration of radium. There is the equivalent of four ounces of radium in 2,000 to 3,000 vials formed into tiny needles, at the plant.”[xxiii]
I first stumbled upon the story of the radium girls on the blog, Read More Science. Sarah Olsen, science writer and founder of the blog, observed, “Radium Girls is a tale of what happens when a corporation silences women and suppresses science. It’s a caution against heedless belief in a substance we don’t quite understand, and an outcry against the unjust treatment of innocent workers”.[xxiv] This story--virtually untaught in American classrooms and not remembered in daily life--has a living history. The Center for Human Radiobiology was developed to study the surviving dial painters. Some dial painters survived into their eighties but continued to suffer from honeycomb-like bones and other health issues.
Sarah Olsen’s book jogged memories of my own mother speaking on family history and it launched me on a genealogical investigation--I knew the end of this story, but not the beginning. Marion’s exposure to radium lingered in her body. Marion Murdoch O’Hara Barrett--my great-grandmother--died in 1976, suffering from Alzheimer’s and aluminum deposits on the brain. Was her illness the result of radium exposure or of exposure to another hazardous substance during her time in industry? I will likely never find out definitively. Interestingly, Alzheimer’s, aluminum, and industrial disease have recently been linked in the case of a 58-year-old male working in England in the preparation of insulation materials for nuclear fuel and space industries.[xxv] Marion’s son, Robert, does attribute her decline and eventual death to her time at US Radium Corporation.
Though I have had very little contact with my mother’s paternal family, I remember hearing about Marion, her children, and the physical impact dial painting and industry left upon our family. Several of Marion’s children--including my grandfather- John Joseph Barrett--suffered from cardiac illnesses. Many of his siblings passed before their time. Marion’s daughters waged battles against cancer and/or autoimmune disease. Before losing her fight to ovarian cancer, Marion’s daughter, Alice, once attributed the high frequency of cancer among the women of the family to the watch dials and radium buttons--the toys they played with as children. I will forever be grateful for this research project--it opened new doors to family members whom I had never met and started a shared dialogue about our family’s past. It led to a pooling of knowledge about our fallen family members. After all, family history is the only way I will ever meet my grandfather, many of his siblings, and my great grandmother. Though radium dial painting was discontinued after World War II, the legacy of this industry still has a tangible impact today: on the bodies of the women employed as dial painters, on the families they left behind, and on the environment.
Erin Becker is the Visitor Services & Volunteer Coordinator at the Long Island Maritime Museum in West Sayville. Her research interests focus on the convergence of women, labor, and the environment through a global extractive maritime economy. Her work in museums grapples with investing local peoples in their resources (historical, archaeological, and environmental) as stakeholders through outreach, education, and the development of new public programming. She can be found at @ErinE_Becker on Twitter.
[i] New York State Census, 1905. Assembly District 19. Election District 29. Page 25. Lines 10-12. Accessed through Ancestry.com
[ii] New York State Population Census Schedules, 1925. Election District 34. Assembly District 6. Page 11. Lines 11-14. Accessed through Ancestry.com
[iii] Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, (Sourcebooks, 2017), 4.
[iv] Advertisement for Radior Peau de Velour (night cream) in The Sun, March 23, 1919. Page 44, Image 44 http://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn83030431/1919-03-23/ed-1/seq-44/.
[v] “Why Radium Paint Shines” in The Post Star, July 31, 1924, Page 10, Image 10 http://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn84031447/1924-07-31/ed-1/seq-10/
[vi] The Evening Gazette, November 3, 1920, Page 5, Image 5 http://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn83031647/1920-11-03/ed-1/seq-5/
[vii] “Why Radium Paint Shines” in The Post Star, July 31, 1924, Page 10, Image 10 http://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn84031447/1924-07-31/ed-1/seq-10/
[viii] “YOUR WATCH A POWER PLANT : Really Enormous Amount of Energy is Concentrated in that Luminous Radium Dial” in Monroe County Mail, June 3, 1920, Page 3, Image 3 http://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn88074547/1920-06-03/ed-1/seq-3/
[ix] Harrison S. Martland, “The Occurrence of Malignancy in Radio Active Persons: A Genral Review of Data Gathered in the Study of the Radium Dial Painters, with Specfic Reference to the Occurrence of Osteogenic Sarcoma and the Interrelationship of Certain Blood Diseases,” The American Journal of Cancer. Volume XV. No 4. (October 1931) https://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/amjcancer/15/4/2435.full.pdf
[x] Moore, 4.
[xi] Robert Barrett, Phone Interview with Erin Becker (November 11, 2019)
[xii] Robert Barrett, Phone Interview with Erin Becker (November 11, 2019)
[xiii] Moore, 9.
[xiv] Claudia Clark, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935 (University of North Caroline Press, 2000). 17.
[xv] Moore, 57.
[xvi] Moore, 36.
[xvii] Medical Record, June 1925. National Archives Catalog, Digital Collection. Identifier No. 75719762. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/75719762
[xviii] Medical Record, June 1925, National Archives Catalog, Digital Collection. Identifier No. 75719674. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/75719674
[xix] Claudia Clark, “Radium Poisoning Revealed: A Case Study in the History of Industrial Health Reform,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, Vol 19. No 1. (1993): 73.
[xx] Clark, “Radium Poisoning Revealed,” 75.
[xxi] United States Environmental Protection Agency, Superfund Site: U.S. Radium Corp. Orange, NJ, https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.Cleanup&id=0200772#bkground
[xxii] David E. Pitt “E.P.A. Preparing for Radium Removal in Queens,” New York Times (February 11,1989) Secion 1, Page 31. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/11/nyregion/epa-preparing-for-radium-removal-in-queens.html
[xxiii] David E. Pitt “E.P.A. Preparing for Radium Removal in Queens,” New York Times (February 11,1989) Secion 1, Page 31. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/11/nyregion/epa-preparing-for-radium-removal-in-queens.html
[xxiv] Sarah Olsen, “The Glowing Girls of America’s Radium Industry”, Read More Science, https://readmorescience.com/2019/07/10/the-glowing-girls-of-americas-radium-industry/
[xxv] Keele University. "Elevated brain aluminum, early onset Alzheimer's disease in an individual occupationally exposed to aluminium." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140212093300.htm (accessed November 9, 2019).