The Radium Girls: The Dial Painters Who Sued a Company and Won

Why did factory girls glow in the dark after their shifts?

They walked home lit up like lanterns. Radium dust settled into their hair, their collars, the folds of their dresses, and after dark it gave off a faint, greenish glow. Their handkerchiefs glowed in their coat pockets. Their shoes glowed faintly in a dark closet overnight. Some of the women painted their nails with leftover paint before a date. One dusted radium powder on her teeth so she’d have a smile that shone when she laughed. It was a party trick before anyone understood it was a diagnosis.

The women worked at dial-painting studios, the largest of them run by the U.S. Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, starting around 1917. Their job was to paint luminous numbers onto watch faces, clock dials, and military instrument panels using a paint mixed with real radium, marketed under the brand name Undark. The work paid well for the time, close to three times the average factory wage. It drew young women, many still in their teens, who considered themselves lucky to have it.

U.S. Radium wasn’t the only company running a studio like this. Similar operations existed in Waterbury, Connecticut, and in Ottawa, Illinois, where the Radium Dial Company put scores of women to work using the same paint, the same fine camel-hair brushes, and the same technique for keeping a line crisp.

What was ‘lip, dip, paint,’ and why did it matter?

Supervisors taught a technique to keep the tiny numerals crisp: lip, dip, paint. A worker would twirl the brush’s bristles between her lips to draw them into a fine point, dip it in the radium paint, paint a few strokes, then repeat. A practiced painter could finish hundreds of dials in a single day, and each one meant shaping that brush point with her own mouth, over and over, hour after hour.

Camel-hair brushes splay quickly, and a splayed brush ruins the delicate lettering on a watch face no bigger than a thumbnail. Lip, dip, paint solved that problem cheaply. It also meant that every dial painter was swallowing radium, day after day, for years.

Some women asked if the paint was safe. They were told it was, and some accounts describe supervisors reassuring them it might even be good for their health. That claim fit the era’s fashion for radium tonics: bottled water sold under names like Radithor, jugs called Revigators marketed to sit in a home water crock overnight, radium toothpaste, radium soap. If radium was sold as a cure for fatigue and arthritis, a factory girl had little reason to doubt the powder on her own tongue.

Who were the women behind the names?

Grace Fryer was 18 when she started at U.S. Radium in 1917. She left the job after a few years, and when her teeth began falling out and her jaw started to ache, she went looking for answers no doctor could give her. Katherine Schaub, who started at the same plant around the same time, became one of the most vocal of the women, giving interviews and testimony that helped the public understand what had happened inside the Orange studio. In 1932, Schaub wrote about her own decline for the magazine Survey Graphic, one of the few firsthand accounts published while any of the women were still alive to tell it.

Mollie Maggia, a coworker, died in 1922 after a horrifying decline. Her jaw disintegrated to the point that a doctor removing what he thought was a loose piece of bone lifted out her entire lower jawbone. Her death certificate listed the cause as syphilis. Her family disputed that diagnosis for years, and later research treated it as a convenient label for a disease the company had every reason not to name.

By the mid-1920s, five women, Grace Fryer, Katherine Schaub, Edna Hussman, Quinta McDonald, and Albina Larice, would become the public face of the fight against U.S. Radium, a group the press nicknamed the Radium Girls.

Did the company know radium was dangerous?

U.S. Radium’s own chemists and executives handled radium with lead aprons, ivory-tipped tongs, and protective screens in the same building where the dial painters worked with no protection at all. Internal correspondence and later court testimony showed that the company was aware, at least by the early 1920s, of studies linking radium exposure to serious illness.

Sabin von Sochocky, the chemist who invented the glow-in-the-dark paint and had once served as the company’s president, developed radium poisoning himself. He died from it in 1928, the same year Grace Fryer’s lawsuit was filed, a detail that undercuts any claim that the danger wasn’t understood at the top.

His successor, Arthur Roeder, continued to tell workers and the public that the paint was safe, even after commissioning outside health studies whose grim findings never reached the women on the factory floor. When Harvard physiologist Cecil Drinker completed a 1924 study documenting anemia and bone damage among the painters, the company suppressed the report and released its own version claiming the workers were in good health.

Marie Curie, whose research with Pierre Curie had isolated radium in 1898, had nothing to do with the marketing of Undark or radium tonics. Her own notebooks are still too radioactive to handle without protective gear, and she died in 1934 of aplastic anemia, a condition almost certainly caused by decades of unshielded exposure to radioactive material in her lab.

What happened to the women’s bodies?

Radium behaves like calcium once it enters the bloodstream. That’s exactly the problem. The body can’t tell the difference, so it deposits radium in bone alongside calcium, where it stays and keeps emitting radiation from the inside for the rest of a person’s life.

In the jaw, that radiation destroyed bone tissue and blood supply. Doctors began calling the result radium jaw, a slow necrosis that caused abscesses, loose teeth, and in the worst cases the kind of bone collapse that killed Mollie Maggia. Elsewhere in the body, radium in the bone marrow caused severe anemia. Years later, in some survivors, it caused tumors: bone sarcomas that developed more than a decade after their last shift at the paint tables.

Doctors at the time had no framework for any of this. Radium poisoning wasn’t a recognized diagnosis, so women who came in with rotting jaws and crumbling bones were told they had syphilis, or arthritis, or nothing physically wrong at all.

How did Grace Fryer’s lawsuit change labor law?

Grace Fryer wanted to sue. She spent two years unable to find a lawyer willing to take the case. New Jersey’s statute of limitations gave workers only two years from the date of exposure to file an occupational injury claim. By the time symptoms actually showed up, years after that first shift, most of the Radium Girls were already outside that window under the law as it was then applied.

In 1927, attorney Raymond Berry agreed to represent Fryer and four other women. The case, filed in 1928, became a national story, covered by newspapers that ran headlines about the “living dead,” a phrase drawn from testimony describing women so frail they had to be carried into the courtroom. At one hearing, several of the women were too weak to lift their arms high enough to take the oath, and the judge let them swear from their chairs instead.

U.S. Radium settled before the case reached a verdict. Each woman received a lump sum of $10,000, a $600 annual pension for life, and payment of all medical and legal expenses. It wasn’t the kind of money that undid what had happened to their bodies. But the settlement set a precedent: a company could be held financially responsible for a disease that took years to surface, not just an injury that happened in a single accident.

What came out of Harrison Martland’s autopsies?

Harrison Martland, the chief medical examiner for Essex County, New Jersey, is the reason radium poisoning became a diagnosis instead of a rumor. Starting in the early 1920s, Martland performed autopsies on former dial painters and developed methods to measure radioactivity in bone and breath. In 1927, five years after Mollie Maggia’s death, his team exhumed her remains and found them still highly radioactive, direct physical proof that the radium hadn’t broken down or washed out. It had simply stayed.

Martland’s breath test, which measured radon gas exhaled by living survivors, let doctors diagnose radium poisoning in women who were still alive, not just at autopsy. His published findings, appearing in medical journals through the 1920s, gave the Radium Girls’ lawyers something they badly needed: hard scientific evidence connecting the disease to the paint, independent of anything the company was willing to admit.

What happened at the Illinois radium plant?

Grace Fryer’s settlement didn’t end the story. It moved it west. At the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois, women were still painting dials with lip, dip, paint well into the 1930s, years after the New Jersey case had made national headlines. The Illinois workers even nicknamed themselves the Society of the Living Dead, echoing the phrase used to describe the New Jersey women, because company officials kept insisting the Ottawa paint was a different, safer formula.

Catherine Wolfe Donohue, who had started at the Ottawa plant as a teenager in the early 1920s, spent years fighting for recognition that her declining health was an occupational disease and not, as the company argued, something else entirely. By 1938 she was too sick to leave her home, and an Illinois Industrial Commission hearing was held at her bedside so she could testify in person. The commission ruled in her favor. The company appealed, and the ruling was upheld on further appeal not long before Donohue died later that year.

Her case mattered for the same reason Fryer’s did: it forced a second state, a decade after the first fight, to treat a slow industrial poisoning as a real workplace injury rather than a private medical mystery.

What changed in workplace safety because of them?

The Radium Girls’ case pushed several states to reform how occupational disease claims were handled. The clock on a claim could now start from the date of diagnosis rather than the date of exposure. That single change mattered enormously for any illness with a long latency period, radium poisoning among them, and it still shapes how workers’ compensation law treats slow-developing industrial diseases today.

The case also fed into a longer regulatory arc. Industrial hygiene standards for radioactive materials tightened through the 1930s and 1940s. The diagnostic groundwork Martland laid, combined with the legal precedent from the Fryer settlement and the Donohue ruling, became reference points decades later, when the federal government built the occupational disease and workplace exposure rules that eventually fell under the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, created in 1971.

None of the original Radium Girls lived to see OSHA. But the next time a factory worker gets a hazard warning about a substance nobody bothered to test on them first, that warning exists partly because a handful of young women in New Jersey and Illinois refused to let their illness stay unexplained.