The disease quickly spread to Mollie’s throat tissues and ate its way to her jugular vein. Literally falling apart, Mollie wasn’t the only one now with this condition, Grace Fryer and some of the radium girls were also starting to suffer pains in their jaws and feet. Eventually by May of 1922, Mollie was desperate as she had already lost most of her teeth and her lower jawbone broke and was entirely removed. After that, she had aching limb pains that made her unable to walk, but the doctor only sent her home with aspirin concluding that it was just rheumatism. It all started with some of her teeth aching that were then extracted, followed by agonizing ulcers seeping with blood and pus that made her breath foul. In 1922, Mollie Maggia – a colleague of Grace – had to quit work because she was sick and did not know what was wrong with her. Many people died of radium poisoning which is why the men at the radium companies wore lead aprons and use ivory-tipped tongs when working with this element in their laboratories and yet the dial painters were not furnished with such protection. Even Marie Curie herself had suffered radiation burns from handling this element. You don’t need to be afraid”.īut it was all a lie. Savoy “Naturally you don’t want to put anything in your mouth that is going to hurt you. Mae Cubberley, who trained Grace with the procedure later remembered that she had asked “Does this stuff hurt you?”, and she was answered by the manager named Mr. It was a technique to fit the brushes to the tiny dials that were sometimes only 3.5 centimetres wide. Obediently following the technique they were taught, Grace and her colleagues would slip their paintbrushes between their lips to create a fine point - a practice that was later called “lip, dip, paint routine”. They would sometimes wear their best dresses to the studio to have them shining in the dance halls at night and even go so far as painting their teeth with radium to have that glowing smile which would attract their suitors more. Several of these laborers were teenagers, other than the fact that they had small hands perfect for the aesthetic work they were seeking financial freedom in a time when female empowerment was thriving.Īlluring these girls to this job was the radium’s luminosity because by the time their shifts end, they would actually glow in the dark. Dial painting paid more than three times the usual factory job and it was considered as "the elite job for the poor working girls". The new element radium, which had been founded by Marie Curie, was utilized to paint watches and military dials by the working class women who flocked the studio after war had been declared. Little did she know that this job would change her life and the US labor laws forever. Grace Fryer, an 18-year old youngster who wanted to help the war effort, started to work as a dial painter on Apat the United States Radium Corporation (USRC) in Orange, New Jersey. Literally "glowing in the dark" after their shifts, the girls started to fight a legal battle against the injustice of their employer denying their claim when they began to experience horrible side effects due to radium exposure. During the First World War, hundreds of young ladies labored by painting watch dials using luminous radium paint in clock factories.
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