Sandra Wright

cheeseanonioncrisps:

jewishdyke:
justthesource:
tilthat:
TIL ‘US Radium’ employed women to paint dials of watches with radioactive radium paint. The women were instructed to point their brushes on their lips. This led to many of the workers’ losing their jaws and even deaths. Company paid examiners covered it up and claimed they had syphilis.
via reddit.com
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Radium_Corporation
for anyone interested, i HIGHLY recommend reading “The Radium Girls” by Kate Moore
the story is so insane and heartbreaking. the working class female employees were kept completely in the dark about the potential dangers of radium and their workplaces were extremely hazardous. the radium paint got all over their workrooms, bodies, and clothes. the women noticed that the radium made them twinkle in the dark and look beautiful, so they would spread it all over their dresses before going out to party. also, from what i remember, they would go so far as to brush it into their teeth to make their smile look more dazzling.
basically, it was marketed to the young women as glow in the dark glitter when really they were really ingesting hundreds if not thousands of micro-doses of radioactive materials. daily. for years.
the workers were almost all young women just beginning adulthood and carving out a life for themselves, and the radiation sickness they contracted due to the company’s negligence caused them to die extremely slow, extremely painful, and tragically early deaths en masse.
workers were denied medical coverage from the company. later, multiple workers later sued the company and made labor rights history by establishing the right of individual workers to sue for damages from corporations due to labor abuse.
Saying they had syphilis was a deliberate tactic to ruin the girls’ reputations by implying that they were sleeping around (since syphilis is sexually transmitted), therefore making people less likely to listen to them.
The male management wouldn’t go near the radium without protective clothing, but doctors were paid to go into the factories and tell the girls that it was good for them. (The same companies also sold food and drink laced with radium on the same principle, citing studies that they had paid for.)
To prove that the radium companies were responsible for the deaths, they exhumed some of the dead girls to test their corpses for signs of radiation poisoning. Their coffins glowed in the dark.